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.
Pyramid Power
Many organizational patterns, especially outlines, are built on a hierarchical structure that classifies ideas and facts according to their level of generalization. At the top level is the thesis. Below this are the major conceptual divisions, each of which may be further divided along paragraph lines. This is the essential pattern of the Thesis/Support Essay, which takes the pyramidal structure through four levels (thesis, topic sentence, support sentence, detail).
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 ...Occasions for Exploratory Essays
The exact nature of an exploratory essay can't be known in advance. It emerges gradually from decisions and discoveries made along the way. Individual writers go in different directions, depending on their interests and their specific writing contexts.
Read more ...Anticipating Opposition
One essential characteristic of argument is your sense of an adversary. You aren't simply explaining a concept to someone who will hear you out and accept or reject your idea on its merit. Argument assumes active opposition to your proposition. To win acceptance, then, you must not only explain and support your proposition, but also anticipate and overcome objections that the opposition might raise.
Read more ...Develop Your Paragraphs
Your topic sentences indicate the major support areas for your thesis, and the guide sentences show how you can develop each paragraph. Still, your paper is far from complete. While you've opened up your main idea to expose its parts, you have yet to get down to giving the specifics, the precise details that will help your reader feel the full weight of your thought. You must show the foundation of specific evidence that your general ideas are built upon. The following suggestions for paragraph development will help you coax forth details that will make your writing solid and substantial.
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