Writing is not for everyone. Writing is a self-discipline exercise, a test of resistance, a neverending battle between yourself and the blank void that is the space you are writing in. Many people find it difficult just to write a couple of sentences, imagine writing 2, 7, 200 blank pages that stare at you, mock you, and defy your self-esteem. But we're not here to create a support group on how writing is very difficult, boo-hoo, and cry about it; we're here to discuss something: If writing is so hard, why are there writers? What is the role of this person that challenged him or herself to fill spaces, and transform them into coherent sentences? How do you get to the point where writing goes beyond a college essay? And mostly: How can we improve how we write?
According to Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, in her essay "Composition As a Write of Passage", part of the Writing Spaces collection of essays, you have to begin by doing small compositions during your first days in college, in order to get adjusted to a certain rhythm of writing. Most certainly, that is the point where high school English isn't enough to satisfy the thirst of a graduate English TA. Arriving at the point where you need to write for survival, you have to take in account several aspects that we'll be naming throughout this essay. And most importantly: Unless you intend to develop your professional life as an organic farmer or a carpenter, no matter what your major is, you will always need good writing. You are a writer, until stated otherwise.
1. Do some previous research
Every text, from a Biology paper to a Business report, needs to have some previous research. There is no muse that magically plants a seed in your head, where you'll let it sleep, feed it with magical beans, and voilà: That dream report suddenly appeared, perfectly well written. Even fiction writers have to do research about their future works. Is my character Lebanese? Then, I have to search how people in Lebanon behave, what do they wear, what are the customs. For instance, if you are writing a science fiction piece, you will still have to do research! Writing about working aliens at the XMY2078 Galaxy, Planet Xubroid must involve serious thinking: How is life in that galaxy? Are these humanoid aliens or zoomorphic aliens?
If a person is doing a report on the market's fall on the first quarter of 2013, investigation on the context must be done, because otherwise they will just be just meaningless sentences, thrown randomly.
2. Gather notes
While researching, a writer must not forget to take notes. This is very important. Each time we read something amazing, life-altering, we get so caught by awe that we tend to forget to write it down, causing failure to remember what was the idea in the first place. Ideas don't come easily, thus is why we take notes, because ideas spark at unusual moments. And if a writer is reading a book, and likes a certain paragraph, writing must be made, with the exact number of page. Reading is an ally when taking notes for the text. Sometimes, we find ourselves in others, especially other writers. Gita DasBender in her essay "Critical Thinking in College Writing: From the Personal to The Academic", adds the following about the subject of reading for writing: "When reading any essay, keep track of all the important points the writer makes by jotting down a list of ideas or quotations in a notebook. This list not only allows you to remember ideas that are central to the writer's argument, ideas that struck you in some way or the other, but it also you helps you to get a good sense of the whole reading assignment point by point." (2010) Other ideas can help you, but you have to remember those ideas.
3. Quotations: Santa's little helpers
Depending on the intentions of the writer, quotations can be a great support for ideas, mainly in professional, academic or technical writing. For more personal writing, such as statements, opinion pieces or fiction, the input of an external source isn't really that necessary.
But quotations are like wine: A couple of glasses are just fine, but if you take the whole bottle, you are just getting drunk. When writing an academic essay, quotations must not surpass 10% of the paper. Otherwise it will only be a summary of other people's work, with no personal input.
4. Every building needs a structure
Organization is the key to effective writing. If a writer starts writing whatever pops up first into its head, it will surely end up with a mixture as eclectic as chocolate pudding with lasagna. The structure of the paper is important for coherence and the connections of the ideas and notes taken previously. A basic skeleton might help: Writing the important points that you'll want to mention in your text will help you to be more sharp, but the skeleton cannot interfere with the natural flow of the text. Like E. Shelley Reid says in the essay "Ten Ways To Think About Writing:
Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Students", part of the compilation "Writing Spaces":
"When we write to the rules, writing seems more like a chore than a living process that connects people and moves the world forward" (Reid, 2010).
Even if you know exactly what you want to talk about, trying to make everything fit into a closed structure might repel potential readers since the text written with no enthusiasm can be felt by the reader.
5. Originality
Many artists claim that there is no such thing as an original idea. Even though this can make sense until a certain point, it does not justify the lack of critical judgement of the writer. Maybe one thousand minds will have exactly the same idea, but each mind is different; therefore, each approach will be distinct from one another. Introducing quotations in the text is not a synonym for plagiarism. If a writer wants to be respected for what he or she writes, copying another person's work is far from making it happen.
That is why writers have to make notes, write down the author, and if it comes from an unknown source, they have to state it clearly in the text that the fragment they are inserting doesn't belong to them. Besides, nowadays there are, literally, thousands of websites and search engines capable of detecting even the slightest bit of plagiarism.
6. Have fun with it, even if you aren't going to win the Booker Prize
If you want to improve your writing, the most important part is to have fun with writing. Imagine that you are Sherlock Holmes solving a puzzle in 221b Baker Street, or imagine you are a famous journalist writing the piece of a lifetime, even if it's just an essay for a class. When you start enjoying putting together sentences, ideas will flow like a river, and your reader will notice that.
Get yourself involved in what you are writing. If you are writing fiction, try to get as into the story as you can, living the experiences of the characters, feeling what the characters feel; if you are writing a business report, make sure you know what you are talking about, show evidence, imagine you are a Stock Broker in Wall Street. Remember that good writing will not only help you to get better grades, but it can also improve your job prospects, make your career advance, and communicate better with others.
Writing is like jogging: At first, your muscles will get sore, it will hurt, and you will probably hate it after the first fifteen minutes, but after proper training and practice, you will learn to enjoy the path as much as the finishing line. It takes hard work, but after doing it for a while, your brain will get accustomed to performing difficult verbal tasks, and elaborate more complex sentences.
Besides writing, you have to keep reading in order to get better. Take reading as the warm up for a good writing session, because it will bring new techniques to the table, as well as adding new words to your personal vocabulary, and change the way you have been writing so far.
Works cited
Lowe, Charles, and Pavel Zemliansky. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2010. Web. 18 Oct. 2014.
Essays:
- Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musings for College Writing Students by E. S. Reid
- Composition as a Write of Passage by Nathalie Singh-Corcoran
- Critical Thinking in College Writing: From the Personal to the Academic by Gita DasBender
