In my last post, I discussed narrative’s importance to all sorts of writing, and I offered tips on narrative sequencing and organization.  Today, I want to focus on how writers make decisions about including details in narratives, and how writers can evaluate a piece’s rhetorical needs in order to create the best narrative for the job at hand.

Narratives tell stories: what happened, how it all began, who did what to whom….  Details can enrich and enliven narratives, contributing to their purpose or theme.  However, if they’re not used judiciously, details can clog and distort narratives.  For example, say you have a narrative in which a man checks his watch.  Do you describe the watch, or not?  The answer is that it depends. 

In one narrative, the watch might be nothing more than a means to an end.  For example:

He checked his watch as he left the building.  Dammit, he thought.  I’m already behind schedule.  As he hurried to his car,…

Here, it didn’t matter what the watch looked like; the writer might not mention it again.  Moreover, the character is in a hurry, and taking time out to describe the watch would slow the narrative’s pace. 

But what about another example?

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Technorati Tags: blog writing, narration, narrative, Revision, writing, writing tips

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 Narration is one of writing’s building blocks, the basic strategies that writers employ to tackle a variety of writing situations, genres, and purposes.  For our earliest human ancestors, as for us, storytelling functioned as an important social and cultural construct, a way of organizing experience.  It’s no surprise, then, that a writer will draw on his or her storytelling skills, no matter what he or she is writing.

If you’re working on a novel or a short story, you probably pay attention to narration already.  But what if you’re writing a blog post, or an academic argument, or a news profile?  You may not think about narrative strategy, but chances are, you’re using narrative principles in these pieces, too.

For example, I might begin a blog post with an anecdote about something I experienced that got me started thinking about the post’s topic: a day at the library, for example.  But the point of my post is not just to relate that story; in other words, my post’s overall genre is not autobiographical narrative.  The point of my post is to share strategies for writing in a way that is compelling for readers.  Although my library narrative merely served an introductory function, I still needed to pay attention to the way I told that story.

I often use narrative strategies here at Writing Power to present examples that will help to clarify my arguments.  These are usually super-short vignettes in which I imagine writers trying to communicate or readers trying to understand.  These examples, where for a moment you see a bleary-eyed writer massaging his or her temples in hopes of coaxing out a fresh idea, are mini-narratives.

As I hope the above examples show, narratives can pop up just about anywhere, whether you’re “writing a story” or not.  We humans just gravitate toward stories.  If you need further proof, just sit down and watch the advertisements during an hour of prime time TV: you’ll see a parade of 30- and 60-second narratives, each with a clear beginning, middle, and end.  

Okay, so writers use narratives in all sorts of ways.  What techniques should writers pay attention to in order to construct strong narratives? 

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Technorati Tags: blog writing, narration, narrative, writing, writing tips

 Paraphrasing is a powerful tool that allows you to do two important things simultaneously. 

First, it provides a mechanism by through which you can include the ideas of other people.  No writer writes in a vacuum.  You’re always writing for others to read, and often, you’re writing in response to ideas you have read.  Paraphrase is an elegant way to incorporate those ideas and thus enrich your writing. 

Second, paraphrase maintains your unique writerly voice.  When you include another writer’s words directly, as in quotation, you are letting their voice take over your work for a short time.  This practice’s drawbacks may not seem obvious when thinking about a single quotation.  But often, writers do not stop at one quotation: they need many quotations from several different sources.  One thing leads to another, and before you know it your paper is an open mic night, and you’re the emcee.  Shouldn’t you be the main act instead?

A beginning writer does not know how to quote and paraphrase effectively.  An intermediate writer often knows how to quote.  But an advanced writer will prefer paraphrase because of its flexibility.  Experienced writers want to be able to craft their own sentences, even if the ideas behind them come from a source. 

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Technorati Tags: blog writing, how to paraphrase, paraphrase, quotation, writing, writing tips

 Relatively inexperienced writers tend to walk around with a mental list of writing rules, which they have painstakingly gleaned from high school and college English and writing teachers.  A snippet of such a list might read:

1.  Don’t use personal pronouns such as “I” or “you” when writing a paper.

2.  A good thesis statement lists the three items the author will discuss, and each item in the thesis corresponds to a paragraph in the body of the paper.

3.  A good paper should be organized as follows: tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, and then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. 

4.  A conclusion should summarize and restate.

There is no problem with a list like this in theory.  Guidelines help make order out of chaos and help us learn which writing structures are preferable to others.  The problem with this list is its inflexibility.  The list of writing rules becomes The Writing Commandments, with all the attendant fear and trembling.

The academic writer is faced with some puzzling questions as assignments become more complex.  What happens, for example, if your thesis statement doesn’t lend itself to the three-item list format?  And what if you can’t adequately explain each point in only one paragraph?  Doesn’t this conflict with Commandment number 2? 

Given this conflict, what are the options?  The writer could jettison the more complex argument in favor of one that fits more comfortably into the five-paragraph model.  Or, the writer could defy the Writing Commandment, which would be a cardinal sin, of course.  Hmmm…

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Technorati Tags: paper conclusions, writing, writing a conclusion, writing tips

 This is it: you’ve been assigned your first paper of the spring semester.  It’s due in two weeks, and your palms are already sweaty.  It’s not that you hate writing.  You enjoy creative writing - poems, personal narratives - when you have the time.  But writing papers for school has always filled you with dread.  The ram-a-pencil-through-your-frontal-lobe kind of dread.

Or perhaps it has been years since high school, college, and graduate school.  You’ve finally gotten the hang of How to Write Well - how to write college papers well, that is.  Yet now that you’re out in the work world, the same qualities that made your English professor rave are the ones that make your boss rant.  What is going on here?

The problem is that there are many kinds of writing situations:  creative writing is distinct from academic writing, and academic writing is distinct from professional (business) writing.  Each kind of writing has its own criteria for quality, and many of them do not overlap.  (For example, I recently devoted an entire post to demystifying criteria for one specific kind of writing: the summary.) 

The student in the example above likes the freedom of creative writing but finds academic writing intimidating.  Conversely, the employee mastered academic writing but is struggling to make the transition to professional writing.

Like so many things in life, awareness is the first step toward improvement.  If you’re a student, the following tips will help make you a more successful academic writer.  If you’re not a student anymore, the following tips will help you realize which of your writing-related skills may need to be modified for workplace success.

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Technorati Tags: academic writing, citation, paper organization, paper writing, scholarly community, scholarship, writing

 Writing is not one task with a specific, unchanging set of rules.  Consequently, it’s often counterproductive to classify writing as “Good” or “Bad” because doing so assumes an oversimplified view of what writing is.  Instead of aspiring to the title of “Good Writer,” I propose that each of us should strive to become a more effective writer.

Effective writers know that there are many different types of writing, from proposals to poems, from diary entries to legal defenses.  They realize that different types of writing have different requirements: the elements that make a good poem are not the same ones that make a good encyclopedia entry.  Moreover, effective writers know how to adapt their writing to suit their particular audience, genre, topic, context, and purpose. 

The ability to adapt your writing for maximum effectiveness is an immensely useful skill.  And learning how is easier than you might think.  You’ll need to focus on two things: 1) increasing your consciousness concerning what different types of writing require and 2) gaining the tools to respond to a given writing situation. 

Let’s practice these two components of effective writing using summary, an essential building block in many modes of writing.

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Technorati Tags: how to summarize, summary writing, writing, writing tips