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.
In Search of Form
Everything has a form. In writing, the goal is to find a form that suits your material and purpose. You may sense a clear pattern emerging early in your writing process, or you may try out a few promising designs.
Read more ...Basic Punctuation
Punctuation need not be mysterious or problematic. The number of punctuation marks is small, and once mastered, they become tools that help shape your meaning and vary the rhythms and patterns of your sentences.
Commas, periods, and apostrophes are three basic marks you can't get along without. Quotation marks, also, are often necessary. First master those four, then move on to the others.
Read more ...Global and Local Perspectives
Revision means "re-seeing." Strong revisers develop a "critical zoom lens" that allows them to shift perspective from broad overview to minute detail, and to see how these levels of composition relate. To revise well, then, you must become a perceptive and imaginative reader of your own work, a reader who can anticipate another reader's response and see new ways the writing might evolve.
Read more ...Opening and Closing
Beginnings serve two important purposes. The first is to get you started writing. The second is to get your readers started reading. Early in your writing you're concerned more with the first purpose: getting off to a good start, maybe with enough push to carry you into the heart of the essay. Yet the beginning that gets you going won't always be best for getting readers involved. That's okay. You can take care of that later, after you've seen how the essay is taking shape.
Read more ...Revising for Readers
Up to this point, most of your writing has been informal, maybe somewhat personal. If you've produced a draft at all, it's probably quite rough and will need revision on both global and local levels.
Read more ...Three Argumentative Appeals
While there's no infallible formula for winning over every reader in every circumstance, you should learn how and when to use three fundamental argumentative appeals. According to Aristotle, a person who wants to convince another may appeal to that person's reason (logos), ethics (ethos), or emotion (pathos).
Read more ...Stating Your Thesis
A thesis is a one sentence statement about your topic. It's an assertion about your topic, something you claim to be true. Notice that a topic alone makes no such claim; it merely defines an area to be covered.
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