Start Writing
There is no single best way to begin a writing project. What's best is what gets you going and builds momentum for the journey ahead. You may want to start right in on a draft or do some pre-planning.
Often, simply Choosing a Subject can be a challenge. You could start Freewriting to locate your subject and generate ideas. Or you might prefer to first gather information from Outside Sources, or to brainstorm using The Journalists' Questions.
Whether you're writing an informal essay, a technical report, or the next great American novel, the suggestions in Discovering What to Write will help you get going.
Write Strong Sentences
Effective sentences are vital to your writing. They are fundamental carriers and shapers of meaning—the pulse of style. If you want to work on your sentences, try the following Paradigm sections: Basic Sentence Concepts, Expanding the Basic Pattern, Six Problem Areas, Designing Effective Sentences.
For help with punctuation, try Basic Punctuation.
Webs and Networks
Like pyramids, webs and networks organize ideas into meaningful clusters and identify how the clusters are related. Here, however, the design tends to be more freeform and open-ended, with less rigid ranking and with numerous cross links among categories.
Read more ...Basic Sentence Concepts
Our language organizes thoughts into sentences. As a core, these sentences have a two-part structure. For simplicity and easy reference, we can represent the two parts as follows:
Read more ...The Writing Context
Few people enjoy writing so much that they do it just for fun. Sometimes an impulse or insight may inspire us to sit down and write "just for the heck of it," without any sense of readers or purpose. Poems and journals often start like that. If you've kept a journal, you know such writing can be enjoyable and worthwhile. You can explore your experience and sift it for meaning. Yet even such expressive writing springs from a real life context that elicits language. All writing is situation bound. It's a response prompted by various needs, desires, and demands from both inside and outside.
Read more ...Constructing a Montage
A quilt maker looks at scraps of cast-off fabric strewn about the attic floor and sees a design. Something—some juxtaposition of red beside lavender, some connection of past and present, facts and memories—triggers an impulse, starts an intuitive process. The quilt is both many and one—many individual pieces and one single object.
Read more ...A Learning Cycle
As you begin to identify key issues and problems for further exploration, you may wish to consider the learning cycle model below. It is based on the work of the French learning theorist, Jean Piaget.
Read more ...Arguing in Context
Like other types of writing, arguments respond to specific situations: a need is not being met, a person is being treated unfairly, an important concept is misunderstood, an outdated policy needs to be reexamined. Strong arguments respond effectively to such writing contexts.
Read more ...Introductions and Conclusions
The beginning and end of your essay are positions of high emphasis. They deserve careful attention. Keep them short and purposeful. Use them to create and satisfy expectations. Get into the habit of reading your introduction and conclusion together, with an eye toward revision, as one of the last stages in your writing process.
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