Student Clues free essay sample

In any event, my readers will be my judges. Organization. The guide is organized in divisions for developing an argument, finding a topic, developing a thesis, and documenting the sources. A substantial part of his section refers to research and documenting sources on the Internet. In most cases, have focused on main objectives expressed in the convenient form of helpful hints at the end of each section. Various types of writing have been brought into focus: informal essays, compare/contrast essays, thesis support essays, argumentative essays, and exploratory essays. Readers are informed about the specific rules for writing research papers. Since my particular experience involves writing about literature, a distinct chapter refers to writing about poetry, fiction, or a play. The unit on science writing instructs on the basic requirements for writing an adequate scientific report. The sections on style and mechanics remind readers of the virtues of plain and concise style. The modes and techniques of competent writing are very important because they tell much about who you are.If you do not know it yet, they will help you to find out. In any situation, the reader of this apparently prosaic book will be on the winning side. Happy Writing! 3 GETTING STARTED One of the best ways to get an idea is to wonder about something. For many students, coming up with ideas for an assigned paper begins with wondering bout the general topic of their paper and trying to formulate their thoughts as questions. Writing is like sculpting rather than like archery. You can begin with something crude and end up with something great.Writing is a slow process that takes time and labor; it is not like attempting to hit the bulls eye with your first shot. So, plan and schedule yourself some time to think, to read, to talk over your ideas, and to do some exploratory writing. It will be easier for you to get started on a paper if you let yourself?indeed encourage yourself?to take seriously the things that puzzle you and the questions that occur to you in a lecture, in your reading, or in discussions with classmates. Writing down your questions, and then trying to answer them in a free, unedited way may lead you to ideas that will make for an interesting worthwhile paper for you and your readers. 4 Writing as Thinking One of the best ways to start thinking about something is to write about it. In order to start thinking through writing you may have to nudge yourself. Take notes while you are talking with a classmate or professor about a problem you have come up against in your paper. Alternatively, think out loud into a ape recorder and then take notes on whatnot hear yourself saying.The main point is to try some form of writing as soon as you can. If you have nothing to say about your thesis, write about why you are having trouble, what got you interested in the topic, what you think you ought to read, or whatever. In addition, write down questions that you think may be worth trying to answer. The very act of trying to formulate a question will help you think about your topic. Remember: developing a question, like developing a thesis, may have to happen gradually. Once you have done the hard work of urinating an incisive question, the answer may be easy to express.Writing will also spark ideas that had not occurred to you and help you to confront issues you might not see if you are just thinking about your topic. Generating Ideas through Free Writing Sometimes you may not be fully aware of the ideas you have about a topic. A good way to discover your ideas is to try an exercise (one that you may already know) called free writing. Sit down with pencil and paper, or at the computer, and give yourself a short but specific amount of time (say, two minutes) to write. The rule of the game is that you have to keep writing throughout the time that you have given yourself.Do not stop to think over what you have written, to change 5 grammar or spelling, to wonder about word choice, to think about relations among sentences or phrases, or to worry if what you have written is any good. Just start writing and keep writing. You can write about whatever comes into your head, or you can try to write about something closer to your topic. If nothing comes to mind, then write Nothing is coming to mind or I have nothing to say. If you keep at it, two minutes at a time with a break in twine, eventually something will come to mind. Putting whatever comes mind down on paper may break your block and allow you to Start working toward expressing ideas that are relevant to your paper topic. A variation of this exercise is to free write without looking at what you have written. It is easiest to do this at the computer by turning off the screen. Just write with looking at whatnot are writing. You may find that, as you write without seeing your writing, you begin to focus on the ideas you are writing about rather than on the words. Free writing helps ideas come to the surface, but hose ideas may come out in a confused and disorganized way.That is fine. What matters is letting yourself explore possibilities. After you have done some free writing see if you can say in a more precise and orderly way what has emerged from your writing. Then do some more free writing and see what that produces. Some of what you write will have to be thrown away; some of it will lead to an idea that will have to be developed; some of it may even be usable as it is. Eventually, you may be able to develop a thesis and the beginning of an argument just by free writing. Free writing can also be seed after you have developed the core of your ideas.As you work on species parts of your paper, try beginning with free writing, especially if you know only roughly what you want to say. Doing so can make the producing a first draft less agonizing. 6 You will have opportunities to revise later. The important thing at this stage to get ideas down in writing. Mapping Some writers find it easier to express and organize their thoughts if they us a visually interesting method of arranging their ideas on paper. One approach is to cluster or map your ideas. You can begin a map or cluster by putting eye word or phrase in the center of a page.