19

writing

Mr. Karnofel


Table of Contents

How Do I Begin a Draft?.............................................................................................. page 1

Writing the Introduction.............................................................................................. pages 1-3

Thesis Statements and Topic Sentences................................................................... page 3-4

How Do I Plan and Organize My Writing?.................................................................... pages 4-7

Elaboration: How Do I develop Ideas?------------------------------------------------------------------------ pages 7-10

Choosing Appropriate Details..................................................................................... page 11

Unity, Coherence, and Transitional Devices.............................................................. pages 11-18

How Do I Write a Conclusion?------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ pages 18-19


How Do I Begin a Draft?

Getting Started:

The introductory paragraph of a paper can be a very difficult place to start writing. You might find it easier to begin with another part of your composition. Here are some guidelines for starting at a point other than the introduction:

Guidelines for Starting In the Middle

· Develop the best ideas you have gathered from hour pre-writing and sharing techniques.

· Look at what you’ve written and start to play with the ideas. Reorganize, move ideas around, delete unnecessary ideas, and strengthen weak sections by adding details.

· Think about where the ideas you have written might lead. Also think about how you might lead into, or introduce, what you have already written.

The “starting-in-the-middle” technique can work for any kind of writing—expressive and imaginative, as well as expository. For example, imagine that you want to write a mystery story. You have a key scene in mind, and you know who your characters will be. The trouble is, you don’t know how you want to behind your story, and you’re not sure how to conclude it. You can begin writing with your key scene. Once you have that on paper, you can more easily go back and write an introduction telling who your characters are and how the plot begins. You may even think of new angles and plot twists after beginning in the middle.

Writing the Introduction

At some point, however, you will have to draft the actual beginning of your piece—the introduction. An introduction usually serves two purposes:

· To catch the reader’s attention

· To suggest or state the main idea

If the piece of writing is a single paragraph, the introduction may be only one or two sentences long. If the piece is a longer composition or report, the introduction may be a paragraph or more in length.

A strong opening is crucial if you are to catch your readers’ attention. The first several sentences are especially important. You can experiment with the following techniques.

Startling or Interesting Facts An unusual fact can disturb, surprise, or inform your readers or make them curious. Notice how the writer uses the words alarming evidence to introduce the fact that more than half the adults in the survey do not exercise enough.

Example: Alarming evidence about the state of fitness—or lack of it—in the United States continues to mount. A Centers for Disease Control survey of more than 25,000 adults revealed that 55 percent do not exercise three times a week for a 20 minutes at a time, the minimum amount needed to provide health benefits.

Vivid, Detailed Description: A graphic, mysterious, or sensory description of a person or place can capture the reader’s imagination. Here, the author presents a vivid description of events and only at the end tells the reader when they took place.

Example: Everywhere, over the entire earth, volcanoes spewed gases into the sky. As heat and gas rose into the atmosphere, massive clouds formed, blotting out the stars. From one end of the globe to the other, lightning storms cracked and flashed. This is what the earth was like four and a half billion years ago.

Questions: A question can get your reader thinking and wanting to read on to find the answer. Notice how this question gets the reader interested in discovering more about the earth’s “cousin”.

Example: Does earth have a giant cousin in space? A team from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has reported . . . a planet ten times more massive than Jupiter . . . about 90 light-years from earth.

Incidents or Anecdotes: A bit of retelling—of a story or one interesting event—adds human interest that can draw a reader into a piece. The conflict between neighbors told here would cause most reader to want more of the story.

Example: A man in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took his neighbor to court because the neighbor hadn’t cut his grass in fourteen years.

Quotations: A quotation can personalize and add interest to a piece of writing. The quotation chosen by this writer brings something inanimate to life.

Example: “A flute,” wrote and early nineteenth-century British critic, “is a musical weed which springs up everywhere.”

Writing Thesis Statements and Topic Sentences

Stating the main idea in your introduction can make it easier for the reader to understand what you are trying to establish, describe, explain, or prove. The first sentence in a paragraph or composition often establishes the main idea. The main idea of a composition is called a thesis statement; the main idea of a paragraph is called a topic sentence. Such a statement helps you organize your thoughts by summing up what you want to express, support, and develop. Thesis statements and topic sentences are most useful in expository writing.

Thesis Statement: A thesis statement presents the main idea of a piece of writing. It is almost always a single sentence in the introduction, but it can be split into two sentences or appear elsewhere if necessary.

A thesis statement not only tells what your topic is and how you will treat it, but it may also limit the topic, suggest a pattern of organization, or even reveal the tone of the piece of writing. It helps you clarify your ideas for yourself as well as for your readers. Suppose that you want to write an essay for your home economics class on cooking stir-fry vegetable using a Chinese-style frying pan, or wok. You might begin by writing the following thesis statement:

Topic Sentence: A topic sentence is to a single paragraph what a thesis statement is to a longer piece of writing: it states the main idea and suggests what will follow. Suppose, for example, that you are asked to write a paragraph explaining the importance of the balance of powers in the United States government.

You know that each of the three government branches—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—holds some power over the others, thus making sure that no single branch becomes too powerful. You can sum up this main idea for your paragraph with the following topic sentence:

The balance of powers in the United States government is important because it ensures that no individual part of the government becomes too powerful.

The rest of your paragraph might then give examples to show how the three branches of the government check one another’s power.

How Do I Plan and Organize My Writing?

After you have chosen a topic and gathered some ideas, you need to organize your thinking and plan your writing. This will help both you and your reader understand what you want to say. Planning your approach and organizing ideas is like packing for a trip. To do it well, you must know something about where you are going. First you lay out everything you think you will take. After more thought, you might decide to leave some things out or add others.

The way you plan and organize your writing will be determined by the material you’re writing about, just as the way you pack for a trip is determined by your destination. For example, if you are writing a report on a subject you know only a little about, you must do a good deal of planning and research before you begin to write. On the other hand, if you are suddenly inspired to write a story, you might begin writing immediately and carefully revise your first draft later.

Organizing your writing is like asking, “Where do I want to go, and how do I get there from here?” Writers, like travelers, can ask themselves this question at any stage I their process, but they usually have some idea of their goal at the beginning. Some writers like to organize their ideas before they begin writing. They often use outlines to plan their work. Other writers like to get their ideas down on paper first, and work out the organization as their writing develops. Many writers use a combination of these techniques.

Types of Organization

Main Idea/Supporting Details: One way of organizing your ideas is to sort them according to whether they are the big ideas—the principal messages you want to convey—or smaller details that support and illustrate those ideas.

Suppose you have brainstormed ideas for a short piece about soccer, your favorite sport. You noticed that many of your ideas are about improving your skills, so this becomes the main idea. In your notes, you cross out phrases about equipment, rules, and other ideas not related to skills and circle the notes that do apply.

Chronological Order: Writers often present events in chronological order, or the order in which they occur. This organization is especially useful in telling a story or explaining a process.

One way of organizing ideas chronologically is to make a time line—a list of events arranged in the order in which they happened. For example, you could use the time line below to develop a paragraph about the invention of the bicycle.

Example: Soon the biggest of the boys poised himself, shot down into the water, and did not come up. . . . After a long time, the boy came up on the other side of a big dark rock, letting the air out of his lungs in a sputtering gasp and a shout of triumph. Immediately the rest of them dived in. One moment, the morning seemed full of chattering boys; the next, the air and surface of the water were empty.

Spatial Order: Visual details are often easiest to understand when they are described in spatial order, or according to their position in space. Suppose you want to explain how video cassettes are organized at a local store. The most natural way would be to proceed from section to section, starting at one end of the store and ending at the far end.

The simplest spatial-order descriptions are written from a single physical point of view, or vantage point. If you are describing a street and describe what you can see from there. If you decide to move down the street at some point—perhaps in order to describe what’s around the corner—make sure to alert your reader to the change by using transitions.

In the following passage, Jack London uses spatial order to organize his description of a complex landscape. He uses the transitions on one side, beyond the pool, and below as if giving directions to a hiker.

Example: On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow, a cool, resilient surface of green that extended to the base of the frowning wall. Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up to meet the opposing wall. Fine grass covered the slope—grass that was spangled with flowers, with here and there patches of color, orange and purple, and golden. Below, the canyon was shut in. . . . The walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon ended in a chaos of rocks, moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines.

Order of Importance, Degree, or Quality: Sometimes, especially in persuasive or informative writing, you may want to order details based on their importance, usefulness, familiarity, or some other quality. This order can be from most to least or from least to most of the quality. For example, to present information quickly for hurried readers, most news stories are written with the most important facts in the first paragraph and the least important facts at the end. On the other hand, if you were writing a letter to the newspaper editor urging people to fight pollution, you might build your argument from the least to the most important points to arouse emotions.

Notice how in the next paragraph, the writer begins with a little-known detail about the brain and ends with a fact almost everyone has experienced—that thinking can be hard work.

Example: The more than 100,000 chemical reactions that occur in the brain each second require huge amounts of the body’s stored energy. In fact, the brain can burn as many calories in intense concentration as the muscles do during exercise. That’s why thinking can feel as exhausting as physical workout.

Cause-and-Effect Order: When you hear a good joke, you laugh. This is a familiar cause-and-effect relationship. One event (the effect). At times, you may want to describe a chain of causes and effects in order to show clearly how they are connected. In the following paragraph, a writer explains the chain of events that produced much of the art we see today in public buildings.

Casual organization can help you explain things like how machines work or why the continents move. You can also use it in fiction. For example, you might explain why a character fears enclosed places by describing how she got lost in a cave as a child. Transitions such as therefore, as a result, and consequently can help you signal the causes and effects you are describing.