A Writing Guide

Before all is said and written, some advice about advice deserves our first attention. When you write, you are expressing yourself: your arguments, your conclusion, an overview of your search for evidence. Thus, one man's advice is another's stifling constraint. Therefore, take my suggestions for what they are: not orders, but counsel offered to ease your journey through essay or research paper. In the end, though, it is your trip. Enjoy the sights.

It happens eventually to even the most elusive, course-switching students, even number-crunching accountants: a writing assignment. Don't feel pressured--even if first steps are the most important. All you have to do at this stage is choose a topic, or question, with which your paper will grapple. Whether you proceed in logical steps to the determination of your topic, or just stumble into it, a good paper will have its best chance at being good if...

• You choose an issue in which you are interested. Rest assured that if your topic bores you, then your presentation of it will bore your reader. That's bad, especially if your reader is also your teacher.
• You ask a big enough question, one with implications in myriad fields or endeavors. Be honest. Regardless of how important you may think gerbils were to the First Crusade's success, are others going to shrug their shoulders, or will they start interacting differently with all rodents?
• You ask a small enough question. The point here is not to follow maxim #2 too eagerly, when actually you need a topic small enough for you and your reader to digest without discomfort. In other words, keep things manageable.

Now: breathe deep (but avoid the "gathering gloom") and ask yourself the same question as any professional researcher/writer: what interests me, and how can I make it fit the current task?

Like humidity in Louisiana or road dust in rural Iowa, you have no choice but to accept the fact that writing requires time. Only the rarely and unfairly blessed have found this to be otherwise. The rest of us need time. No thesaurus can replace hours spent on research and organization, nor camouflage the lack of the same. So budget yourself some: time early in the semester to mull over your options, maybe even delve into some of them far enough to check their feasibility; time to do some real research; still more time to organize your evidence; then to write a first draft; and more time again to revise later drafts, always to proofread yet one more time, maybe even to let an intelligent friend read your work.

What you will need to begin: an outline. This small piece of premeditated organization will provide you the other basic needs of a paper, i.e., an argument, an introduction, the body of your essay, and a conclusion(s). Go through your notes, which ought to be on notecards which you can categorize and re-categorize at will; as you organize them, they will suggest the structure of your outline and argument. You do not have to go into excruciating detail at this stage; this merely lets you see how your evidence all ties together.

First steps are the hardest: actually, they do not have to be. Since you know what will follow the introduction, you merely begin with general statements which grow progressively more focused through the introduction. By the beginning's end, you should have yourself and the reader aimed squarely at the issue and ready for the mounds of evidence you have collected. At this juncture in the writing process, however, conventional wisdom begins to unravel. Some would have you write at warp speed, trusting to instinct and not trifling over revision. Others would prefer you to imitate Flaubert, who once agonized all morning over whether to insert a comma only to remove that same comma after hours of reconsideration in the evening. As I suggested above, develop your own method.

Drafts: Like watching an Irishman pour Guinness from a tap, it takes several pulls to produce the perfect draft. After you have finished bleeding ink on the paper, you will need to clean it up. This means analyzing your argument's presentation: is it clear? does it flow from paragraph to paragraph? does it show clearly in the conclusion? Of course, you will need to proofread the paper for grammatical and spelling errors. I cannot overstate the importance of not relying solely on your computer's spell-checker. Countless are the egg-covered faces whose owners did not personally double-check their text after the computer "okayed" it. Misspelling cripples your credibility (nor does it help your grade). The new grammar tools are likewise suspect, especially when it comes to dealing with subtle shifts in verb tense. On the whole, though, try to avoid complicating your life (and essay) with tense shifts and rely as far as possible on the simple past.

Wrapping it up: Once you reach the end, read backwards to the beginning; this will help a great deal in catching misspellings. Are you willing to let a friend read it? If not, why do you want to let me loose upon it? If yes, then congratulations; you are done. Print it out, staple or paper clip it together, and turn it in. Do not bother with a plastic binder or folder of any sort: they do not impress, they get in the way, and they make me think the paper probably lacks substance. Turn it in; late papers lose a letter grade every day.

Advice from others: My thoughts on how to write a paper hardly qualify as gospel. Among others who could prove useful to you both in the construction of a paper's parts and in the art of writing well are the following three.

• The Longwood Writing Center: Check out Greg Salyer's website for bushels of information and links to a great many writing resources. Besides on-line dictionaries and reference manuals, there's a vital link to the writing lab as well.
• Strunk and White. The Elements of Style. (A marvel of brevity and pertinence, this small volume deserves review annually. Besides covering troublesome grammatical and composition situations, it has much advice on how to develop a vigorous, attention-holding prose.) It is available on-line in its oldest version at http://www.bartleby.com/141/index.html.
• Kate Turabian. A Manual of Style. (A guide prepared by the woman who was for decades the final hurdle for many writers-to-be at the University of Chicago. If you have a question on how to build any reference, organize your paper, and other nitty-gritty issues, Turabian has the orthodox answer.)

Formal vs. Informal: Among the tenets which the gurus of composition currently like to spread about is the advice "to write like you speak." Does this mean that you should use slang, colloquialisms, contractions, and sentence fragments? On the whole, no. Papers are formal affairs which deserve a commensurate use of the language. This does not mean, however, that your prose should be stilted, convoluted, or as bland as the menu at certain unnamed Mexican food establishments. Times and places exist which do call for some "spice" in even formal prose, but you have to develop a discernment for those opportunities and how much seasoning to add. Read your text out loud and listen as you go; consider the pacing and whether a sentence ought to be broken down, whether some levity is appropriate, whether it sounds pretentious. Such a speaking exercise can help your writing flow more smoothly. As to split infinitives, undefined antecedents, the ever-dangling participle and other transgressions, however, they remain anathema and need not pollute your paper.

Passive Voice: Nothing weakens a paper quite like the passive voice. It causes the action to drag and often clouds the issue of who is doing what. When in doubt, always use the active voice, and even when you are sure a passage calls for passive voice, ask yourself again. It just might, especially if you are wanting to emphasize the subject's role over other information in a sentence. If you do use passive voice, let it be a deliberate editorial choice and not a bad habit. The signals for the passive voice consist of a form of the helping verb "to be" and the participle of the main verb. (Example: Biff was surprised to learn that arsenic is poisonous. Here, the subject (Biff) is not performing the sentence's action; rather the sentence's action is happening to him. When the subject is receiving the action instead of dispensing it, you have wandered into passive voice.)

Copulative Verbs and other Weaknesses: Although you do not have to let it become a fetish, try to keep your use of the verb "be" to a minimum. Am/is/are/was/were act as little more than equal signs and, however useful, do not give your prose the same energy that action verbs do. This also applies to the constructions "It is..." or "There are...". Sometimes these forms are necessary, though, so do not let this overburden your development as a writer. Much more serious is the propensity of students to over-generalize, to make sweeping claims about what always is, or what all people do, or what every situation calls for. Why not just take a hot air balloon ride over a WWI battlefield? Someone will certainly put a hole in either balloon. Instead, take time (ooh, that word again) to think and claim only what your evidence supports. Nor should you weaken your stance with qualifiers like "seems", "appears", or "probably." With all these words, you are immediately expressing doubts in the validity of your position. If you have made your stand, then stand. (Strunk and White cover all these points, and more, in their small but authoritative tome.)

Putting off assignments is an art form for many of us, and we would do well to remember Plato's advice: artists are dangerous—in this case to themselves. Little harm (and perhaps some good) comes from cleaning your room, cleaning your neighbor's room, watering the plants, and alphabetizing your CD collection before facing the baleful and blank page that awaits your words. Deciding not to tackle the project at all until the night before is another matter altogether. My counsel in this situation is simple. Go to the video store, rent Braveheart, and take to heart the advice of another Steven, this one Irish, given at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, to Mel Gibson's character as the arrows rained down. If you know the quote, then you have my point: do not, do not, do not put this paper off till the last minute.

Good Luck and Enjoy!