How to Write

Being able to write well is the most valuable thing you can get out of your education. In fact it is your education, since writing well is just thinking and organizing your thoughts in a way that others can understand. These guidelines will be useful for all the assignments for my classes, and also for other classes as well.

Before you begin 

Begin Early--by reviewing your sources, writing an outline or compiling your bibliography. Even if you are not sure how your final argument will be structured there should be some parts of the paper that you would feel confident writing right now. Write them. Writing helps you to figure out what research you still need to do, what problems you have still not thought through and what you do know for sure. Filling up pages with words also makes you feel like you are making progress and makes you a little less anxious. Anxiety causes procrastination, which prevents you from doing your best work, and the only sure cure for the anxiety is to face it and get to work early. On the other hand you need to remember that work has a way of expanding to fill the time available. Don't allow a project in any course to take an unreasonable amount of your time. One part of doing any project is being able to budget your time properly.
Analyze your assignment--Pay close attention to the wording. If you are required to answer a question, what is the question really asking? If you have come up with the topic on your own is it a good one? Will this topic or thesis really lead to an interesting and worthwhile paper? 
Do some research--Doing more than the minimum amount of research needed to complete the project is almost always worthwhile. Students have a tendency to try to limit research, since they think it does not contribute to their final goal. This is true if you goal is to fill up pages with words. If your goal is to write a good paper in a limited amount of time, research helps a lot. It is pretty obvious that more research will lead to a better paper, but it also often makes writing the paper much quicker. Students often trip over the fact that they don't understand what the author is talking about. If the book keeps mentioning the Treaty of Westphalia and you have no idea what that is, look it up.

Writing the paper 

Controlling your voice
     The most consistent problem that students have is with controlling their voice. This can mean several things. First, you need to be clear on who is speaking in your paper. Is this paragraph a summary of what your author is saying, your own opinion, or your author's opinion of what someone else is saying? I am often confused as I try to figure out what each part of your paper is trying to say, and this is often because you are not not sure yourself. It is natural to write by summarizing what you are reading, but when you do that you get a long summary of the source with occasional comments by you tossed in. This is o.k. for a first draft, but then you need to go through and figure out what you want to say say and what would be the most effective way of saying it.
   
Citations
    Although the short papers you will do for my classes usually will not have much by way of scholarly apparatus (footnotes, bibliographies, etc.) it is very important that you do include citations when called for. First is a matter of professional courtesy. Your work is building on the work of others, and it is only polite to acknowledge them.1 Second is a matter of professional honesty. Claiming someone else's work as your own is plagiarism, and will get you expelled. Third and most importantly, footnotes allow the reader to see where your data is coming from and how you are supporting your argument. Notes are not just a meaningless add-on, they are an important part of  your argument.

Other Tips
-Use the basic patterns of development to extend and support ideas and to discover new topics:
-Define and explain an important term: "The Genro were the elder statesmen of the Late Meiji era who, regardless of the actual posts they held, were the real leaders of the government."
-Offer a clarifying example: "The most democratic of the Genro was Ito Hirobumi."
-Classify your subject into types: "All democracies are not the same. There are four main types . . ."
-Compare or contrast your subject with something similar but different.
-Distinguish your subject from a related concept or member of a larger class:
"Although Yan Xishan was considered a warlord he was also a reformer with a real concern for the development of China and Shanxi . . ."

-Consider the real goals of your essay. Student writers often let the immediate, personal goal of completing the essay replace the actual goal of the essay itself. As you write, you should be developing a clearer, more specific idea of what you want to get your reader to believe or feel, and of what you yourself have learned from concentrating on your topic.
-Develop a real argument for your point. Support for your thesis depends on the value of the evidence you present to support it, and on the logic of your thinking. Repeated or passionate assertion without supporting argument works in advertising and politics, but not in academic writing. The logic of your argument should dictate the outline of your ideas.
-Beware of substituting summary for the development of ideas. Some assignments require summary of another writer's argument, or of the plot of a film, book, or play. Usually, however, you should summarize, review, or cite the work you're writing about only as much as is genuinely required to support your point. Academic writing is more than an opportunity to show you've done the required reading.
-Beware of allowing the order of ideas or episodes in your source to dictate the order of ideas in your writing. Sometimes analyzing an argument, a poem, or a play point by point works very well, and it certainly makes things easier. But generally you want to organize according to your own thesis, and place ideas in the order necessary to support that thesis.
-Consider your audience. Usually in academic writing, it's your colleagues-your fellow students and instructors. What do they already know and believe? Do you really need to impress them with your knowledge? Imagine them as specifically as you can. (it may help to imagine how you would explain the same point to a very different audience: your parents, a Hollywood producer, a visitor from another planet.)

Avoid the most common problems in student writing:
-Use separate paragraphs to make separate points. Paragraph structure is the key to essay writing. Developing ideas and developing paragraph structure go together. An essay that unfolds in one or two long paragraphs is clearly in trouble.
-Vary sentence patterns, to keep yourself and your reader interested. If variety doesn't come naturally, work at it consciously. See how many different ways you can say the same thing, and what new relations you can create among sentences—for example, by subordinating or coordinating statements.
-Write like a real person. Serious writing does not require dissolving yourself into a detached, limp, mechanical voice. You've been advised in English classes to use active, specific verbs (especially avoiding overuse of the verb "to be") and to avoid passive constructions. Your English teachers were right. Let yourself write vividly, specifically, and with personality.
-But don't make yourself your subject. Telling the history of how you wrote your essay or arrived at your opinion places the focus on you rather than on your ideas. So does insistent use of phrases such as "I think," "I feel," "I believe." You are very aware that you are writing an essay, and you may resent it or feel uncertain of your powers. So you may be tempted to allude to the situation over and over. But the reader is more interested in your ideas, your arguments, your discoveries. Qualifying phrases are just a distraction.
-Don't pad your writing, no matter how many words the assignment requires.   Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.1
-Avoid inappropriate diction. Excessive informality is as pretentious as pomposity. Everybody knows that nobody likes a stuffed shirt, but for some reason, a lot of writers seem to believe that people just love a smartaleck.

Revise your work thoroughly. Take the time to make revision a separate process, so that you're not tempted to skip it.
-Read your writing aloud. No other technique makes as much difference as this simple step, which most inexperienced writers avoid.
-Ask someone else to read it aloud. Notice if and where they stumble.
-Ask a friend to evaluate your work, and tell you where your point doesn't get across. You wouldn't hesitate to ask them to look at a painting or photograph you did. Take the same attitude toward your academic writing.
-Reread your introduction and conclusion. Is the opening really necessary, or is it just a way to warm up to your subject? Does your conclusion rush to the ending, or does it really allow you to show the strength of your thesis?
-Mark every single phrase you're not pleased with-not just errors in grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Go back and try several different ways of solving each problem, not just one.
-Check your diction for exactness. Be especially wary of the weak verbs "to be" and "to have."
-Use a dictionary and a handbook. Great writers are made, not born. One of the most important, simple things they learn is to use reference works instead of expecting to find everything inside their heads-and then falling into despair when it can't be found there. Every professional writer uses dictionaries and style manuals to check their work. Why should you be any different?
-Let a computer do the work for you. Use a spellchecker function to point out errors you might not catch yourself. And take advantage of the computer's ability to make revision relatively painless. Cut and paste functions let you try out sentences or paragraphs in more than one order. If you don't use a computer now, you'll probably find soon that reserving one, catching on to typing, and learning a simple word-processing program—as complicated as it all may seem at first-still saves you plenty of time and effort compared to writing and revising your work by hand.


Some of the copy-editing marks I use on papers

awk - Awkward. There is something wrong with the sentence structure or phrasing here that is too complex to fix by inserting words. If you can't see what the problem is please come talk to me.

fn -Footnote. You need a note here, or more broadly you need to support this point with more evidence.

frag- Sentence fragment

IP - Paragraph logic. There should be a paragraph break here.

long IP -This is too long to be a single paragraph, but it is not clear where it should be split.

org. -There are organizational problems with this section of the paper.

r-o -Run-on sentence

? - I don't understand your point here.

-- (horizontal line) Good point
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1. This guide was based on one by Keith Allen. 
2. Strunk and White, The Elements of Style Allyn & Bacon, 2000  p.23.