College/University students: A public service annoucement:

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

A) Regarding that term paper you’re working on that’s due soon. Look at the first page. Now, see your thesis statement? No? Where is is? Let’s find it. Is there one? Is there a statement of one or two sentences which tells me, right now, what the damn paper is about and what you intend to DO in this paper? No? Write one and get at least 10% more on this term paper. At the end of page one, I not only want to know what your paper is “about”, but I want to know what YOUR argument is and what YOU are about to do and what kind of evidence you plan to use and vaguely how this argument will be structured. Yes, you must have a fecking argument. Then build the rest of your damn paper around this manifesto. Write a paragraph and think "does this have anything to do with what I said I was setting out to do?

B) Just write a fecking outline already. Yes, I know you’re too smart for that and outlines are for the weak and for people who can’t hold their liquor when they write, but your paper’s organized like a hyaena with a nervous disorder has rearranged your paragraphs in a fit of interpretive dance. Yes, the sentences all look nice, but the paper, when you’re in your third year, should be about more than individual sentences.

Do it-- you’ll thank me. I’m marking papers right now and of the first eleven I’ve read ONE has a clear thesis statement. The others are all written ok and are “about” something but have no coherent argument. Don’t be one of these. They absolutely can not be given an A.
I just read a paper which had an unambitious argument and was written with short, simplistic sentences. But you know what? he gets a B+ or A- because his paper set out to DO something, no matter how minor that project was. At this level I don’t want a glorified book report-- I want a synthetic argument.
Now get back to work. And run it through the spell checker, for Christ’s sake. And check to make sure that the word it suggests is the word you want.

2

You know, two years ago–at the end of high school–I would have bristled at the OP and indignantly shot back, “What the frell? My papers are perfectly fine! How dare you, yadda yadda yadda…”

Looking back now, you are so, so right.

shoots a guilty glance at her not-quite-done-yet-but-will-be-finished-very-very-soon-I-swear Renaissance Europe paper

3

Heh… that sounds like my Augustine paper Im trying to write atm…

I will say though, if you write a detailed outline, it really helps organize your thoughts. One way to organize a paper that I used on my last paper was to write the thing, sans quotes, and then add them in later. That way you can tweak and rearrange without dealing with as much extra stuff, and you know exactly which quotes you need to find.

I wish I had known about my above method during High School.

4

I was fortunate to have teachers in high school that knew to teach what the OP said. I learned to write papers that way, to the point where I now can’t write anything without thinking of it as argument-evidence-evidence.

The outline thing goes hand in hand with this method. If you first establish a thesis statement, then list the main supporting points, and then the pieces of evidence that go into each of the main points, that’s an outline. A good outline should be such that all you have to do is change it to complete sentences and make paragraphs out of it and bam, there’s your paper.

5

I think I got an A on every writing assignment I did in College (and an F on every one I didn’t do :smack: ), and I never wrote a single outline unless it was required by the assignment, and then I wrote the outline after I wrote the paper. But the one thing I was consistent about was using the thesis sentence, supporting paragraphs and summary format. Or as I called it, the"Here’s what I’m going to say, here’s where I say it, here’s what I just said" style of writing. I always thought it was unnecessarily redundant, but that’s what they asked for, so that’s what they got.

6

I write like Rhubarb does. I don’t usually bother with an outline; I just come up with a thesis statement and everything after that is related somehow to that thesis.

That said, though, I have a bone to pick with English professors who are so married to the thesis-outline-draft-finished paper process that students then assume that’s the ONLY way to write a paper. I’ve had to walk friends through papers because they got bogged down with the idea they had to construct the perfect outline. It never occurred to them that an outline can be changed. I agree that this process is useful when you’re teaching freshmen how to write, but give them a chance to internalize what you’re teaching so good writing itself (and not the process) becomes second nature.

Robin

7

Do people really do what you describe the majority of your students in the OP do?

If so, then thank you, 9-12th grade English teachers.

8

I worked as a writing tutor during college, and college students can be awful awful awful about this kind of stuff.

On the other extreme, I remember a peer-feedback session with a classmate who dinged me for not having my thesis statement in the first paragraph. My first two paragraphs were an interesting anecdote serving as a hook to introduce the paper’s thesis, which appeared in the third paragraph; but she’d had “Thesis in the first paragraph!” drilled into her so hard that she couldn’t conceive of an alternate structure.

I don’t think that outlines are necessary, but I DO think that some form of pre-writing is necessary. That may be an outline; it may be a page of scribbled notes with arrows and circles connecting ideas; it may be stream-of-consciousness writing. Without some form of pre-writing, the paper is going to suffer from either a lack of organization or a lack of complexity.

And there’s one last thing that you didn’t include and need to include: rewrite. If your final draft doesn’t look significantly different from your first draft, then you’re not putting the work into it that you should. Granted, if you’re a good writer, you might still make an A; but if you’re in school for an education, and if you care about the topic of the class, you owe it to yourself to finish the first draft at least a few days before the paper is due, and to come back, reread it, and edit it before turning it in.

Daniel

9

I’ve never understood the draft part of papers. I find that if the outline is good and strong, then the rest should follow. The bulk of my time when writing papers is on the outline, then I sit at the PC and write it out. Then the most I have to do is revise poorly written sentances, or correct poor word usage. So I don’t really do a draft, just sit down and write it, then edit the bad parts.

Drafts douns like writing it, then butchering what’s been written, then rewriting it. It seems way too complex when if the initial outline is well structered, then the most that has to be changed is errors or poor wording.

Contributing more the to OP, I find writing an outline to be my bible for the paper. That’s where in point form notes I have my complete argument and how it’ll be layed out. After my thesis, I then put in all the info from the first point in the OP to describe to the reader what I’m going to do. Then I’m off with the actual main points, evidence, and how it relates to the thesis. For the conlusion I just paraphrase my intro and say that I’ve demonstrated all that I set out to do.

10

Well, that answers my draft question. That’s basically what I do, write then walk away for a few days, then go back, edit and check the flow and such. I suppose it’s just the word draft that I dislike. All I do is edit my original, clean it up (sometimes heavily) to make more presentable.

11

I think it basically comes down to, “Can you hold the logical flow of how you want to present the material so that it makes sense to, and ideally convinces, someone else of the rightness of your thesis, in your head while writing, or not?” If not, then do the damn outline; thoughts work much better when organized. If yes, then start writing, and don’t worry about whether it’s the “right” way to prepare a paper. The “right” way is what produces a convincing, clean final paper.

I never outlined. But I knew from the start where I wanted to go with the paper (except for the times I found new insight while writing, which called for a massive revision of what was written to date). On the other hand, I’ve seen papers that meandered like a freshman at 2:30 Saturday morning, with no indication of where they were going until eventually they came to an end, apparently having passed out from the exertion of getting themselves down on paper. Their authors could have benefitted from thinking through what they were trying to do and outlining it.

That said, I loved the imagery of “your paper’s organized like a hyaena with a nervous disorder has rearranged your paragraphs in a fit of interpretive dance.” :smiley:

12

I never outlined as an undergrad either and was fine with it. However, once I started my Masters thesis my advisor sat me down after the first draft and had me do just that because at that length my direction had become totally lost. Then at the dissertation level it was absolutely necessary. A person might as well get in the habit if he or she plans to go on to do any real writing. Same thing with drafts-- if the first draft is good enough for whatever goal, then the work is only so demanding. Another draft can and will improve the work. Yeah, she got an A, but couldn’t it have been better? I guess it depends on what degree of quality you want from yourself. A 10-page paper in an undergrad course is one thing, but think ahead to real writing when one morning you will realize that the first 50 pages of this chapter just needs to be chucked out the window.

13

Please let my students read this as well. I think I made a comment on the first writing assignment to that effect to about 80% of them.

I myself will usually have only the vaguest of outlines before I’ve begun writing (my main points), and I never do more than one real draft. However, my argument is usually quite developed in my head and the post-it notes in all the books I’ve read are my evidence. By the time I’ve pulled out all the post-it notes, the paper is done.

14

Going to college before the age of word processing (gasp) was a mixed blessing. Even with erasable paper, a change in tone or thought inevitably meant retyping a page or more, which was painful for those with ten thumbs. However, the benefit was that meant that thoughts would be ordered before typing, which usually meant an outline, which then led to a clearer paper.

Rearranging electrons is easy, but it may lead to less organized thinking at the beginning because the writer knows that (s)he can catch it later. Fortunately, editing is easier; whether writers take advantage of that, however, is questionable.

15

Formal outlines never help me because once I start writing I invariably go way off of the outline. So my version of outlining involves a list of the stuff I want to say, in some sort of coherent order, and then I write the paper. A lot of the time I end up with something quite different than I intended when I started, but seeing as I get As on most papers, I must be doing something right. Presumably this won’t change whenever I get my rear back in school.

But starting out with absolutely no outline of any kind? Not for an academic paper, no way.

16

The way I understand it (as taught to me by the wonderful Tom Maddox, professor at Evergreen), it’s important to start off messy and end up polished. During the messy stage, your focus is on content: you want to come up with some great ideas in this stage that you can use in your paper, including brilliant and incisive connections between different ideas. When you’re messy, you’re not worrying about saying things well or in an orderly fashion: you just want to come up with what to say.

The rest of the process is just polish, but it’s an intense polish. You want to find a way to order your thoughts to make them interesting, but you still don’t need to have them brilliantly phrased. Then you want to make sure that the individual paragraphs and sentences are readable. Then you want to go back and take another look at the order: does the minor tangent you go on when you’re discussing Goethe’s fondness for animals fit better in the section on his symbolism than it fits in the brief biographical sketch you offer? Or maybe it doesn’t belong in the paper at all?

At some point, you go through and look at the connections. Do the ideas flow reasonably together? Even if you thought they did when you wrote it, you may on rereading it find that you skipped a step because it was so obvious to you, or that you use the word “Furthermore” to connect five paragraphs in a row, which is irritating to read.

At some point, you go through for spelling. NOT JUST WITH SPELLCHECK: your going to miss words who’s misspelling is actually the correct spelling of other words.

Once you’ve got good ideas, arranged in an orderly fashion, with good connections between ideas, and no spelling or grammatical flaws, you want one last pass for beauty and clarity. Maybe you’ve got a sentence with too many nested prepositional phrases, and you can reword it to improve the rhythm. Maybe you used a simile that’s trite: out with it! Maybe you’ve stuck the main idea of a sentence in a dependent clause instead of in the main clause, and by rewording it, you can make the sentence’s grammar reinforce, rather than undermine, the concept. But this is a final-stage polish: you probably want to do it after everythign else is done.

If you’re a very good writer, you MAY be able to pass muster with a single pass on all these concerns. But you still won’t be writing your best. I didn’t learn this lesson until I was almost through college; when I finally realized how much my papers would benefit from being revisited several times, with a focus on moving from chaos to order, their quality vastly improved.

Daniel

17

I will never be able to understand this view. The way I understand it, it’s important to end up polished. It doesn’t matter how you start off, and even if it did, messy would not be preferable. For some people, the step-by-step process of thesis-outline-three drafts-final paper works well, and for the sake of those people, yes, it’s good that we teach that method. But for some people, that particular method does not work well, and if they try to use that method, it will result in more work, lower quality, or both. Compare, for example, my two favorite authors. J. R. R. Tolkien pre-planned everything in exquisite detail, with tomes of background material which he never intended to see the light of day, and some of his stories have dozens of rewrites and revisions. The result of this is that he wrote great books, since that was the method which worked for him. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, never wrote more than one draft (the final one) of anything. What came off his typewriter was what went to the publisher. And he also wrote great books, because that was the method which worked for him. Instead of trying to convince students to use the One True Method of organized writing, we ought to be introducing students to multiple methods, and teaching them to recognize which method works for them.

18

See, this last sentence here in the one I disagree with. Of the worst two books I’ve read, one is by Asimov (The Stars Like Dust). The other–Starship Troopers–is by another author who disdained rewriting.

There are plenty of people who think their first draft is as good as it can be. I’ve not yet encountered anyone who was accurate in this belief.

Daniel

19

And to clarify, I’m not claiming to have the One True Method of writing; rather, I’m saying that of the many different methods that work, they all seem to share some traits:

  1. They start off messy
  2. They end up polished
  3. They involve extensive reworking of the material, revisiting it over time.

Daniel

20

I see where you’re coming from, Left Hand. But it’s been a very very long time since I’ve written a paper where the form was more important than the content. I’m sure my writing could always be more aesthetically pleasing, but as long as it’s all gramatically correct, clear and concise, I don’t need it to be beautiful. Much more important to me is the flow of ideas, and unless something is very wrong with the first draft (which, I’ll admit, has happened), revising my drafts end up interrupting the flow.

This all, of course, applies to papers under 20 pages in length, although even my 30-pager followed mostly the same method.

And, just to clarify, when I say I have no outline, I lie. I have a very clear outline and I have NEVER ended up arguing something I didn’t mean to; I’ve never had a paper take an entirely different direction while doing it. I just rarely write the outline down in anything but the most basic terms. When I write a paper, I’m writing down the argument that already exists in my head.