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Everyone who writes has been told at one time or another to "sharpen the focus" of a paper, a report, or a memo. But that is the kind of advice that often creates more trouble than it resolves. How do you know what to put in and what to take out of a piece of writing, especially if you are writing under pressure? Most people imagine an analogy between sharpening the image in a viewfinder and focusing their words on a page, but locating the center of gravity in an essay can be far more complicated. Writers do not sharpen as much as they transform what they observe into their own perspective. A piece of writing re-creates the world as an hypothesis, whether stated or implied, with proposed evidence to support it. Orwell's essays are good examples of this re-creation. Although it's impossible to tell, from reading "A Hanging," or "Shooting an Elephant," whether they are "true" or "made up," Orwell states, in a straightforward way and in a strategic place in each essay, exactly what question he hopes to discover for us, and what answer he proposes. You might think of Tolstoy philosophical "Epilogue" in War and Peace in the same way, an explanation that makes explicit an underlying principle that has been dramatized in the book. We may not agree with what the writer says, but we can interact with it, weigh it, judge it, and see if we have a use for it. If there is an analogy between making a photograph and writing, it is more appropriately Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment," the image taken at the exact moment when it presents the photographer's discovery of meaning. But in writing, as in music, this presentation of meaning occurs not in a sentence or in a single word but in a structure built over time. The principle is to put in anything that can help reveal meaning, and take out everything that will obscure it. The writer sorts through his or her own ideas, feelings, and experiences to find the best relationship to the material: that point of view which elicits the most energy and precision, with the least wasted motion. The mystery of "focus," is replaced by control over the process, and the writer's principle of selection corresponds to his or her own wisdom and passion. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, the writer sorts through the because-clauses to find evidence of where he or she stands, and of what matters most. These selected blocks of raw material become the center of the argument. The analysis of the because-clauses also yields the "glue," the internal coherence that holds the argument together. You find it as you sift the rough blocks of because-clauses, discovering how opinions, experiences, and examples cluster around your thesis. You lay bare the underlying structure, the unifying principle for the whole paper. I'll begin, then, by testing each of my twelve clauses, asking the same questions about them that any good reader who needed to decide about a writing competency exam might ask. I'll want to see whether each because-clause holds up as an idea; whether it elicits more information as I think about it; and whether it should have a place in the raw draft of my position paper. Clause 1: No one would want to read it. First: Test the because-clause as an idea. "No one would want to read it." Why? (a) Because it's excruciatingly dull to read essays on set questions as if they were real pieces of writing; (b) because it's a dead-end process in which the student gets no useful feedback except a number, or a sheet with inscrutable checkmarks that teach nothing, and which the disembodied reader has filled in perfunctorily; (c) because most of all, no one who teaches writing wants to pretend that one exam question, on any given afternoon, can possibly represent conclusive evidence about any student's writing. The idea of an essay invariably written at the worst possible time for both writer and reader (usually, in the midst of registration, or as classes begin) fulfilling such a function is an illusion maintained by those who don't participate, and a futile exercise for those who do. Second: Test the implications of the because-clause. "No one would want to read it"--that's undoubtedly true. People can be paid to do it, but then they have to be instructed in what to look for, and their own values and skills have to be integrated with or subordinated to those of the English staff. Or the younger or newer parttime members of the staff can be saddled with the job, which is grossly exploitative. Third: Relevance of the because-clause to my position paper. For my argument, this because-clause is a minor but solid point, to be inserted somewhere in the larger argument as a sentence or two. Naturally, writing out this analysis took a good deal longer than thinking it through. For a longer paper, with a timetable that allows for it, writing out these analyses will provide you with some of the language that finds its way into your final draft. But with a shorter schedule, you can simply make notes next to each clause, or use a tape recorder. In either case, you are gathering essential ingredients for the rest of the process: ideas, language, and the glue that holds your argument together. As you become experienced with QUICK WRITING PROCESS, you will find you can combine some analysis with the first spontaneous listing of your clauses. But to begin, you should allow that initial generating process to go on freely, until you have three times as many because-clauses as you need. Then analyze, amplify, and draw connections. Harvesting the becauseclauses, questioning their assumptions, implications, and relevance, yields blocks and sentences and hints of new ideas for the public version of your private argument.
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