Discovering Ideas Handbook

1.2    How to Get Started

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You can write clearly and effectively about many subjects and to many people. But not yet! You need to prepare. Even if you are writing about your own experience, the chances are that you can't write about it immediately and effectively. The essay you will write isn't in your head already, waiting to be put down on paper. Even if you have strong opinions about the topic you are writing about, it would be unusual if you had all of the information you have ever encountered on the topic at the very top of your mind, ready to be recorded.


1.2.1    Read and write about your topic and discuss it with others.

1.2.2    Read for discovery.  

1.2.3    Decide who your intended audience is. 


1.2.1    Read and write about your topic and discuss it with others. 

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Many of us–most of us–tend to feel a little insecure about an essay idea at first, not confident that we can really pull off a good essay from the beginnings of the idea. So there is a natural tendency for us to hide our ideas, keep them back until we feel more confident about them. This is usually a mistake because we can’t get confident about an idea until we have tested it and developed it. Don’t just think about your subject before writing a first draft; read about it, talk about it, listen to other people’s ideas about it, and write about it.  If it is a topic that has been discussed in print, your best and fastest way of getting a better understanding of what others have thought about it is to do some reading. A few hours spent doing background reading on a topic will allow to you to think more clearly about it because you will have a much better idea of what you will be writing about. You may believe that it will save time in writing an essay if you can write completely from your own head without doing any background reading. This is almost always a mistake. It will probably lead to a short essay, which you will then have to expand later, when you have less flexibility with your topic. In many cases trying to write with little or no background about what others have said on a topic will lead to wasting your time on the first version of your essay and having to start over late in the process.

Reading about your topic and discussing it with others doesn’t exclude writing about it. In fact, it’s a good idea to do some background writing on the topic, just as you do background reading, before you start to write the essay. One of the best ways to formulate your thoughts on a subject is freewriting. Just write for ten or fifteen minutes without stopping, without thinking about spelling or punctuation or evidence. Just talk on paper. Freewriting is just for your own benefit; don’t plan on showing it to anyone else. The process of writing will help you to think through what you have to say. Some people find it helpful to talk through their ideas to themselves before or during freewriting, because it’s easier to talk than to write. Other ways of "background writing" before starting your essay are discussed by Chuck Guilford, a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, in the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant.

1.2.2    Read for discovery.  

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You may have formed the habit, especially in reading for school, of reading material as if you were preparing for a multiple-choice test, trying to boil the text down to the literal, direct, correct meaning and to isolate the key points and facts. That may well be an effective way to prepare for a multiple-choice test, but it isn’t a very effective way of reading to develop ideas for an essay. In reading to get background for writing, it is often not as important that you come away with the answers as that you come away with some good questions. Certainly, you should read for literal meaning and try to understand the author’s point. But when you find yourself confused, or disagreeing with the author, or unsatisfied with the evidence or the explanation, don’t regard that as a failure to be ignored. If your goal is not simply to summarize what the author said but to develop some new ideas of your own, to go beyond the text, one of the major goals of your reading should be to discover questions and problems that aren’t just settled by the text you’re reading but that take you beyond it. So look for terms and concepts that you don’t completely understand; underline them or write them down in your notes. Stop while you’re reading to write down the questions that occur to you or doubts you have about the text as well as summarizing the points that the author is making. In reading for discovery, you are not just looking for pat answers and cut-and-dried solutions. You are looking for problems to be solved and questions to be answered. If you take this approach, not only will you be able to write better essays, but you will find yourself more interested in reading texts that have real value. After all, in the "real world" most important questions don’t have pat answers and the most important problem don’t have cut-and-dried solutions.

1.2.3    Decide who your intended audience is. 

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All good writing is written to somebody. Many of the questions about what will succeed and what will fail in a piece of writing are answered by the audience--the intended readers. The level of vocabulary, the length of sentences and paragraphs, the kinds of examples, and the amount of explanation appropriate to a piece of writing are all determined by the audience. You wouldn’t use the same vocabulary in writing a letter to a young child and an essay to a group of college students. Without having some idea who your readers are, you simply can't write well, because "well" has no meaning apart from readers.

So think about who you are writing to before you write. I have asked you to write your essays to a college-level audience and to use our class as your primary audience. You may find it easier to choose one or two specific people and think of yourselves as writing primarily to them. At the early stages of writing an essay, many of us are really writing to ourselves. If I am writing about a subject that is fairly new to me, or relating evidence that I am not very familiar with, I will tend to explain it to myself first. If I am expressing my opinions, I will tend to want to get them down on paper, so that I can see what I think! That’s fine. But if I am going to develop an effective essay, I will need to adapt what I am saying to other people. In an effective essay, I am never merely writing to myself. I am writing to specific people who don’t already know what I know or think what I think. If I am aware of that from the beginning, if I have a target reader in mind as I work on the essay, it will be much easier for me to write and revise my essay effectively.


1.3    Choosing a Topic


Copyright © 2000 by John Tagg

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