Writing
well is easily one of the most sought-after and useful skills in the business
world. Ironically, it is one of the rarest and most undervalued skills among
students, and few professors have the time, resources, or skills to teach
writing skills effectively. What follows are a handful of tips and general
principles to help you develop you’re writing skills, which will not only
improve your grades but will help develop your ability to think and explain the
most difficult topics. Although directed at students, most of this advice
applies equally well to any sort of writing; in the end, good writing is not
limited to one context or another.
1.
Rate yourself.
Far too many students start their papers the
night before they are due and write straight through until their deadline. Most
have even deceived themselves into thinking they write best this way. They
don’t. Professors give out assignments at the beginning of the semester for a
reason: so that you have ample time to plan, research, write, and revise a
paper. Taking advantage of that time means that not only will you produce a
better paper but you’ll do so with less stress and without losing a night of sleep
the evening of the due date. Block out time at the beginning of the semester.
2.
Plan, and then write.
For
some reason, the idea of planning out a paper strikes fear deep into the hearts
of most students it’s as if they
consider themselves modernist artists of the word, and any attempt to direct
the course of their brilliance would sully the pure artistic expression that is
their paper. This is, in a word, dumb. There is no successful writer who does
not plan his work before he starts writing and if he says he does, he’s lying.
Granted, not every writer, or even most, bothers with a traditional formal
outline with Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, lowercase
letters, lowercase Roman numerals, and so on. An outline can be a mind map, a
list of points to cover, a statement of purpose, a mental image of your
finished paper even, if you’re good, and the first paragraph you write. See the
introduction to this post? That’s an outline: it tells you what I’m going to
talk about, how I’m going to talk about it, and what you can expect to find in
the rest of the paper.
Whatever
form it takes, an effective outline accomplishes a number of things. It
provides a ruler to measure your progress against as you’re writing. It acts as
a reminder to make sure you cover your topic as fully as possible. It offers
writing prompts when you get stuck. A good outline allows you to jump back and
forth, attacking topics as your thinking or your research allows, rather than
waiting seeing what you write on page six before deciding what you should write
about on page seven. Finally, having a plan at hand helps keep you focused on
the goals you’ve set for the paper, leading to better writing than the “making
it up as you go along” school of writing to which most students seem to
subscribe.
3.
Start in the middle.
One of the biggest problems facing writers of
all kinds is figuring out how to start. Rather than staring at a blank screen
until it’s burned into your retinas trying to think of something awe-inspiring
and profound to open your paper with, skip the introduction and jump in at
paragraph two. You can always come back and write another paragraph at the top
when you’re done — but then again, you might find you don’t need to. As it
turns out, the first paragraph or so are usually the weakest, as we use them to
warm up to our topic rather than to do any useful work.
4.
Write crappy first drafts.
Give up the fantasy of writing sterling prose
in your first go-around. Write secure in the knowledge that you can fix your
mistakes later. Don’t let the need to look up a fact or to think through a
point get in the way of your Whiteley flow just put a string of x’es or note to
yourself in curly brackets and move on. Ignore the rules of grammar and format
just write. You can fix your mistakes when you proofread. What you write
doesn’t matter, what you rewrite is what matters.
5.
Don’t copy.
Plagiarism is much more than lifting papers
off the Internet it’s copying phrases from Wikipedia or another site without
including a reference and enclosing the statement in quotes, it’s summarizing
someone else’s argument or using their data without noting the source, it’s
including anything in your paper that is not your own original thought and not
including a pointer to where it comes from. Avoid ever using another person’s
work in a way that even suggests it is your own.
Be
sparing in your use of other people’s work, even properly cited. A paper that
is essentially a string of quotes and paraphrases with a minimum of your own
words is not going to be a good paper, even though each quote and paraphrase is
followed by a perfectly formed reference.
No comments:
Post a Comment