Writing Strategies Learned Throughout the Course

• Always outline the essay with transitional topic sentences and evidence (organize!)
• Leave time to reflect and ponder an assignment (write multiple drafts)
• Generate a starting position and motive for everything
• Be open to changing your argument to fit a better audience, evidence or claim after hearing feedback
• Every detail added must always be relevant
• Use “Style”s subject and action formula for revising a paper

One of the most valuable pieces of advice I’ve derived from this course is using an outline to organize my writing so it may be revised to fit a better audience or claim. In high school, while I’ve matured from the typical five-paragraph essay, I have not been trained to create a basic outline map that can be adjusted to fit different claims. As seen from my AP English paper posted in the “Evidence Based Writing” Section,  I usually separate general ideas into sections but don’t think about how organization could play a role in delivering my claim any more than what I have done. In my high school writing reflection “Reflection on Past Writing”, I talk about my use of extraneous details and long-winded sentences. These are all a product of unorganized structure. Thus, I view outlining my ideas as a valuable tool that will also affect many other writing nuances. In this class, I’ve had many chances to practice outlining my rough drafts. Looking over my pieces from this term, I’ve been able to remember much more clearly my claims and motives for writing.

In the first paper, there was a lot more theoretically-based readings on critical regionalist discourse, as seen in the pre-draft materials. Using past knowledge of how to integrate sources, I had many long paragraphs in my workshop draft that did not separate my opinion from big literary critics’ opinions well. Professor Van Kley noticed this and gave me a big piece of advice: “As you work on revision, you might find it useful to keep a working outline that records your logical structure.” He provided a basic outline of the claims and Ideas I’ve generated and I typed them up into a physical outline that served as the basis for my conference draft. However, even during my conference review, I decided to break up my ideas even more in order to provide a more cohesive structure. This included prioritizing my paragraphs based on conceptual lenses (critical reviews) and choosing which claims in past literary discourse best supported my idea. Again, with the final draft, I set up my paper with a post-revision outline that constantly reminded me of who I was writing, why I was writing the piece and what evidence was important to include. This is perhaps the most important implication of an outline. It constantly encourages the writer to review his writing in comparison to the bigger picture. Professor Van Kley offers his final thoughts on my organization at the end of the final paper: “In places, you offer really exceptional paragraphing, though, including powerful and robust transitions, paragraph focus, and clear topic sentences.” Seeing the transformation of my writing from an anomalous blob to a clear structure has been powerful and inspires me to continue creating outlines for future papers.

In my second paper, I had a clear structural guideline to follow: the IMRAD structure. Because we adapted the IMRAD research structure to fit a more academic context, there were set topic headings that made writing the essay much easier. However, even so, there were still illogical structural shifts in each section. For example, my topic was on Swamp Gravy and in my essay I included a “Methods” section detailing the evidence and resources used to generate my claim. However, in combining past literary discourse and new knowledge, my paragraph in the Methods section of the conference draft became a massive illogical blob. Professor Van Kley commented “I’m struggling in places to follow the logical order of this section. That initial paragraph is particularly challenging for me. I hope you can walk me through that part of the piece. – IN general, I’ll encourage you to spend some time with outlining in order to clarify how your different paragraphs fit together logically.” His feedback reminded me to continue evaluating how my ideas form into a cohesive structure on the paper. For my post-revision plan, I decided to once again form transitional sentences that outlined my claims and provide basic evidence for each section. This outline not only provided a means for clear writing, it also helped me develop my claim about Swamp Gravy after seeing how I could potentially layout my essay.

For my third paper, rather than a traditional thesis-first essay, I created a website that presented my claims on Thompson Arena. This was a lot more difficult than drafting papers, and it was often difficult to get started due to the nature of the medium. Creating a website to serve as an essay requires a lot more thought about how it should be structurally outlined. My peers pointed this out during peer review and we experimented with different website themes to see which one best served my argumental purpose. I found that I didn’t accomplish a clear structure until my final conference with Professor Van Kley. His feedback includes challenging me to think about how each section of my website adds to my claim, an idea I had never thought too much of before. We also discussed using section titles (very similar to my topic transitional sentences) to detail what evidence is included in each section.

I think the importance of being a good writer is not only to write and general organic ideas, but also to structure them in a way that delivers a powerful impact on the audience. From this course, I’ve matured through using a typical outline to structure and restructure my ideas, generating better claims each time. I have truly enjoyed learning and growing from this writing course and I hope to continue this technique of organization for every piece of writing in the future.