Chapter 4 The Writing Process: Stage Three
Writing/Revising/Editing
Writing the First Draft
In Stage Three of the writing process, your work begins to assume tis final form. Use your outline, or alternative form of organization, as a guide in composing your paragraph or essay. For college work, your controlling idea should almost always be clearly stated early in the paper. The Toman-numeral parts of the outline will provide the framework for the main ideas of a paragraph assignment or for the topic sentence ideas in an essay. Supporting information-details, examples, quotations-is likely to be used in approximately the same order as it appears in the outline. Keep in mind that you should not be bound absolutely by the outline. Outline often need to be redone just as your initial writing needs to be redone.
Most writers do best when they go straight through their first draft without stopping to polish sentences or fix small problems. Try that approach. Using the information in your outline and ideas as they occur to you, go ahead and simply write a paragraph or an essay. Do not be slowed down by possible misspelled worlds, flawed punctuation, or ungraceful sentences. You can repair those problems later.
Whether you write in longhand or on a computer depends on what works best for you. Some writers prefer to do a first draft by hand, mark it up, and then go to the computer. Computers save you time in all aspects of your writing, especially revision.
Revising
The term first draft suggests quite accurately that there will be other drafts, or versions, of your writing. Only in the most dire situations, such as an in-class examination when you have time for only one draft, should you be satisfied with a single effort.
What you do beyond the first draft is revision and editing. Revision includes checking for organization, content, and language effectiveness. Editing (discussed later in this chapter) involves a final correcting of simple mistakes and fundamentals such as spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. In practice, editing and revising are not always separate activities, although writers usually wair untill the next-to-the-last draft to edit some minor details and attend to other small points that can be easily overlooked.
Successful revision almost always involves intense, systematic rewriting. You should learn to look for certain aspects of skillful writing as you enrich and repair your first draft. To help you recall these aspects so that you can keep them in mind and examine your material in a comprehensive fashion, this is offers a memory device-an acronym in which each letter suggests an important features of good writing quickly. Soon you will be able to recall and refer to them automatically. These features need not be attended to individually when you revise your writing, although they may be, and they need not be attended to in the order presented here. The acronym is CLUESS (pronounced "clues"), which provides this guide: Coherence, Language, Unity, Emphasis, Support, and Sentences.
Coherence
Conherence is the orderly relationship of ideas, each leading smoothly and logically to the next. You must weave your ideas together so skillfully that the reader can easily see how one idea connects to another and to the central thought. This central thought, of course, is expresed in the topic sentence for a paragraph and in the thesis for an essay. You can achieve coherence efficiently by useing the following:
- Overall pattern
- Transitional terms
- Repetition of key words and important ideas
- Pronouns
- Consistent point of view
Overall pattern
Three basic patterns prevail: time (chronology), space (spatial arrangement), and emphasis (strss on ideas). Sometimes you will combine patterns. The coherence of each can be strengthened by using transitional words such as the following:
- For a time pattern: first, then, soon, later, following, after, at that point
- For a space pattern: up, down, right, left, beyond, behind, above, below
- For an emphasis pattern: first, second, third, most, more
Transitional Terms
By using transitional terms you can help reader move easily from one idea to another.
Repetition of Key Words and Important Ideas
Reapeat key words and phrases to keep the main subject in the reader's mind and to maintain the continuity necessart for a smooth flow of logical thought.
Pronouns
Pronouns, such as he, her, them, and it, provide natural connecting links in your writing. Why? Every pronoun refers to an earlier noun (called the antecedent of the pronoun) and thus carries the reader back to that earlier thought.
Consistent Point of View
Point of view shows the writer's relationship to the material, the subject, and it susally does not change within a passage.
Language
In the revision process, the word language takes on a special meaning, referring to usage, tone, and diction. If you are writing with a computer, consider using the thesaurus feature, but keep in mind that no two words share precisely the same meaning.
Usage
Usage is the kind of general style of language we use. All or almost all of us operate on the principle of apropriateness.
Usage is animportant part of writing and revising. Judage what is appropriate for your audience and your purpose. What kind of language is expected? What kind of language is best suited for accomplishing your purpose?
Tone
Tone means that the sound of speaker's voice and maybe the language choices conveyed disrespect to the listener. The tone could have represented any number of feelings about the subject matter and the audience. Tone can have as many variations as you can have feelings: it can, for example, be sarcastic, humorous, serious, cautionary, objective, groveling, angry, bitter, sentimental, enthusiastic, somber, outraged, or living.
Diction
Diction is word choice. If you use good diction, you are finding the best words or a particular purpose in addressing a certain audience. There is some overlap, therefore, between usage and diction.
Unity
A controlling idea, stated or implied, establishes unity in every piece of good writing. It is the certral point around which the supporting material revolves. For a paragraph, the elements are the topic sentence and the supporting sentences.
Do not confuse unity and coherence. Whereas coherence involves the clear movement of thought from sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph, unity means staying on the topic. A unified and coherent outline would become incoherent if the parts were scrambled, but the outline trchnically would still be unified. These qualities of writing go together. You should stay on the topic and make clear connections.
Emphasis
Emphasis, a feature of most good writing, helps the reader focus on the main ideas by stressing what is important. It can be achieved in several ways buy mainly through placement of key ideas and through repetition.
The most emphatic part of any passage, whether a sentence or a book, is the last part, because we usually remember most easily what we read last. The second most emphatic part of a passage is the beginning, because our mind is relatively uncluttered when we read it. For these reasons, among others, the topic sentence or thesis is usually at the beginning of a piece, and it is often restated at the end in an echoing statement.
- Repetition of Key Word and Important Ideas
Repetition is one of the devices in your writer's toolbox. The words repeated may be single words, phrases, slightly altered sentences, or synonyms. Repetition keeps the dominant subject in the reader's mind and maintains the continuity necessary for a smooth flow of logical thought.
Support
A good developmental paragraph fulfills its function by developing the topic sentence. An essay is complete when it fulfills its function of developing a thesis. Obviously, you will have to judge what is complete. With some subjects, you will need little supporting and explanatory material. With some subjects, you will need little supporting and explanatory material. With others. you will need much more. Incompleteing enough support, be sure that the points of support are presented in the best possible squence.
Sentences
In the revision process, the word sentences refers to the variety of sentence patterns and the correctness of sentence structure.
A passage what offers a variety of simple and complicated sentences satisfies the reader, just as various simple and complicated foods go together in a good meal. The writer can introduce variety by including both short and long sentences, by using different sentence patterns, and by beginning sentences in different ways.
In revising, examine your writing to make sure that sentences vary in length. A series of short sentences is likely to make the flow seem choppy and the thoughts disconnected. However, single short sentences often work very well. Because they are uncluttered with supporting points and qualifications, they are often direct and forceful. Consider using short sentences to emphasize points and to introduce ideas. Use longer sentences to provide details or show how ideas are related.
- Variety of Sentence Patterns
Good writing includes a variety of sentence patterns. Although there is no limit to the number of sentences you can write, you may be pleased to discover that the conventional English sentence appears in only four basic patterns.
Each of the four sentence patterns listed has its own purposes and strengths. The simple sentence conveys a single idea. The compound sentence shows, by its structure, that who somewhat equal ideas are connected. The complex sentence shows that one idea is less important than another; that is, it is dependent on, or subordinate to, the idea in the main clause. the compound-complex sentence has the scope of oth the compound sentence and the complex sntence.
- Variety of Sentence Beginnings
Another way to provide sentence variety is to use different kinds of beginnings. A new beginning may or may not be accompanied by a changed sentence pattern. Among the most common beginnings, other than starting with the subject of the main clause, are those using a prepositional phrase, a dependent clause, or a conjunctive adverb such as therefore, however, or infact.
A complete sentence must generally include an independent clause, which is a group of words that contains a subject and a verb and can stand alone. Some groups of words may sound interesting, but they are not really sentences. Three common problem groupings are the fragment, the comma splice, and the run-on.
Editing
Editing, the final stage of the writing process, involves a careful examination of your work. Look for problems with capitalization, omissions, punctuation, and spelling (COPS)
Because you can find spelling errors in writing by others more easily than you can in your own, a computerized spell checker is quite useful. However, it will not detect wrong words that are correctly spelled, so you should always proofread. It is often helpful to leave the piece for a few hours or a day and then reread it as if it were someone else's work.
Source:Brandon, Lee. Brandon, Kelly. Paragraphs and Essays with Integrated Readings, Tenth Edition. Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008
