Research Paper: What Is Good Writing

Samuel Schultz

Instructor: Jeff Sturges

October 22, 2004

Research paper: What Is Good Writing

Simple, Comprehensive, Good

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” (Frost)

This is my favorite poem by a poet named, Robert Frost. The poem is called “The Road Not Taken.” Good writing can be summed up in many definitions. There is no real definition to what good writing is because it is an opinion of a person. When I think of good writing, the details that come into my youthful mind are that the text has to be interesting; it has to be flawless in grammar and punctuation; and the writer must believe that his paper is the best.

I have had the experience of reading many different forms of writing. The paper has to somewhat interesting for me, or I will fall asleep to it in less than five minutes. I’ve had that happen to me more than once. The subject of the paper has to be appealing to the readers a lot of times for them to enjoy it, but the best writers are the ones who can attract you to a subject that you have hated in the past. It shows their skills if they can convince someone to change their mind and/or beliefs.

The main point to a good paper is the fact you can read it with interest. The author must believe that his paper is good, and the author must believe that he can produce good writing (Riabert). If the author finds the paper to be of his best work then he has to interest someone else. If someone says that they find one author to be a great writer or the best in the world, another person can easily find him to be horrible. The fact is that no one is a like, and good writing to one person can be another definition to someone else.

To be on your way to becoming a good writer, one must prepare himself for the paper. To do a good paper you should think of the idea for your paper before anything. You write down your thoughts. After you write down the many thoughts in smart little head, you organize them into an outline, or another form that fits you best. You just need something that will organize your thoughts. You take your thoughts, and group your ideas into different categories that each topic relates to. You take you categories, and you form your major ideas, and the topics are secondary information to the major ideas of the paper. You then have your basic points, and from there you do research on your points to be accurate with your information in your writing. You do your research until you grasp a concept that you can write about, and once you get that concept you write your first draft. The draft won’t be perfect, but once you everything writing out in essay form, you revise your rough draft and rewrite it until you get it to what you feel is perfect. Than after this you pass the paper on to a few of your friends who aren’t afraid to criticize you. You give the paper to those friends for the fact that they won’t lie to you. They’ll tell you if your paper stinks, and you need to redo it. If your paper is excellent, they’ll tell you that for sure. After you get that revision, you rewrite your paper again. Then you give it to a couple of your smart friends to look for grammatical errors. After they find all of your errors, your rewrite again until you feel for sure it is perfect then you turn it in. That is the process at which I believe you can become a proficient writer and produce commendable papers. There are other processes that people say produce good writing. One is you first plan your writing, ignore the language, write and rewrite, find readers, and keep writing. (Zirath) Another is from MIT:

“Prewriting

1.Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document. It includes thinking, taking notes, talking to others, brainstorming, outlining, and gathering information (e.g., interviewing people, researching in the library, assessing data).

2.Although prewriting is the first activity you engage in, generating ideas is an activity that occurs throughout the writing process.

Drafting

1.Drafting occurs when you put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. Here you concentrate upon explaining and supporting your ideas fully. Here you also begin to connect your ideas. Regardless of how much thinking and planning you do, the process of putting your ideas in words changes them; often the very words you select evoke additional ideas or implications.

2.Don't pay attention to such things as spelling at this stage.

3.This draft tends to be writer-centered: it is you telling yourself what you know and think about the topic.

Revising

1.Revision is the key to effective documents. Here you think more deeply about your readers' needs and expectations. The document becomes reader-centered. How much support will each idea need to convince your readers? Which terms should be defined for these particular readers? Is your organization effective? Do readers need to know X before they can understand Y?

2.At this stage you also refine your prose, making each sentence as concise and accurate as possible. Make connections between ideas explicit and clear.

Editing

1.Check for such things as grammar, mechanics, and spelling. The last thing you should do before printing your document is to spell-check it. Don't edit your writing until the other steps in the writing process are complete.” (MITWC)

You find that there are many different views, but they all have about the same idea just there are little things that are different.

Revision can be the focal point in writing a good paper. If your make mistakes, your paper is already look down upon. The idea may be great, but if you have grammatical mistakes, the points are deducted from it. So in the end the paper is considered to be mediocre instead of good. There are many aspects to a good paper; you can’t have one thing with out the other. I believe that are no perfect papers with people having different opinions, but I believe that you can have a perfect grammatical paper. You have to revise and revise because when you read a paper, you pass over a lot of things. The reason is because you know the flow of your paper, and you can pass many things because you’ll think of the things that you wanted to say even though it is wrong on your paper. Good writing is bad writing rewritten. (Raibert)

Another point you need in your writing is that you need to follow the basis of the assignment. If you are writing about brain cancer and all of a sudden you switch to talking about the homecoming dance and how great it is.you are not focusing on the main topic instead you are talking about something irrelevant. You must always follow instructions that are given to you. If you write a paper for a class and do it your own way, it won’t be considered a good essay to the person who is grading it. You have to follow specific instructions sometimes to create a good paper. A good paper is one that pleases you readers.

If you follow the writing process, have few grammatical errors, and write about something interesting, you should be able to produce a good piece of literature, but there are some people who just plain can’t write.