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| Integrating the QUICK WRITING PROCESS System |
| QUICK WRITING PROCESS allows you to prepare, plan, and generate writing in a continuously self-correcting process that allots adequate time and energy to improve the final product. The system focuses on both meaning and the most compelling structure to clarify and enrich meaning. Since QUICK WRITING PROCESS emphasizes efficiency, your writing continuously serves two purposes simultaneously: moving toward meaning; and providing the basis for the next stage in the evolution of the project. The logic and concentration of QUICK WRITING PROCESS, driven by the writer's alliance with time, produces good writing under pressure. QUICK WRITING PROCESS allows you to prepare, plan, and generate writing in a continuously self-correcting process that allots adequate time and energy to improve the final product. The system focuses on both meaning and the most compelling structure to clarify and enrich meaning. Since QUICK WRITING PROCESS emphasizes efficiency, your writing continuously serves two purposes simultaneously: moving toward meaning; and providing the basis for the next stage in the evolution of the project. The logic and concentration of QUICK WRITING PROCESS, driven by the writer's alliance with time, produces good writing under pressure. Preparation The writer's analysis of the question posed and of his or her commitment to answering it initiates the process. Imagining different approaches, you seek the one that will teach you the most, and elicit as much of your own experience, knowledge, and feelings as possible. You clarify the power relationship between you and your reader. How much and what kind of information does the reader want? How free are you to provide that information? What point of view enables you to set the appropriate scope, scale, and style for the project? Part of this initial preparation is to get started by immersing yourself immediately in the material. You want to transform the topic or the question into a subject you can write about with a sense of discovery. You may need to explain your divergence from the question, or your interpretation of it, and this explanation also becomes part of your argument. The boundaries of a writing project often seem narrowly defined by format or convention. You may need to redefine those boundaries for learning, and for teaching the reader. Timetable In beginning a writing process that drives toward a balanced, clear, powerful product, the writer makes an early decision about time. In some cases, you will have little choice: a memo is due the same day; a case study must be in the teaching assistant's mail slot by nine in the evening. In other instances where the writer can schedule work for a deadline a week or several months away, a realistic timetable ensures thoroughness and balance. Skill in making this productive alliance with time increases as you use QUICK WRITING PROCESS, ensuring that each part of the writing process will receive your best energy. QUICK WRITING PROCESS insists on a realistic timetable for completing the whole project before you write the first word. Once you create a schedule for writing under pressure, you abide by it. You may have more to say. There may be unresolved issues. There may be no ultimate, convincing proof for your thesis. But your job is to acknowledge what you know and what you don't know now, and to complete the project on time. Perhaps you will have an opportunity later on to continue, or to return to the project, or to use what you've written under pressure as the stepping stone to a longer, more comprehensive work. But with QUICK WRITING PROCESS, about half of your time is for planning and generating material (the because-clauses that elaborate your thesis, and their analysis), and the other half is for transforming the selected, ordered raw material into a coherent, consistent, unified product. The timetable will ensure a comprehensive, balanced piece of writing under pressure. Plan of Overall Structure After considering the reader's needs and the writer's commitment, and setting a timetable for the whole project, make a quick sketch of the overall structure. Structure enriches, at times even conveys content. The beginning of a piece of writing should set the context and deliver a challenge to the reader; the middle should provide a sense of comprehensiveness, including a view of the other side; and the conclusion should offer the reader a new perspective, a new context in which to view the question. This underlying structural plan facilitates both the process of writing and the act of being read. Some writers expect their readers to fill in gaps and find the lost connections in their writing. That is not a promising expectation. A good reading is rare enough; an intense, symphathetic second reading is almost nonexistent. The clearer your concept of structure at the beginning of a writing project, the greater the likelihood your reader will follow you through that first and only reading. Provisional Thesis A thesis takes a stand on a question, commiting the writer to provide an answer, with reasons, explanations, and examples. It is the internal energy driving good writing: the writer's struggle to make sense, and to engage the reader in the quest for meaning. The answer must be clear before it can be persuasive. In scientific writing, the answer must be clear enough for other researchers to duplicate the work in their own laboratories. In an action memo, the reader must first understand the writer's judgment of various options before adopting or rejecting the recommendation for action. A provisional thesis, then, immediately moves the writer and reader toward meaning. The thesis may become more elaborate as the project unfolds, or it may lead the writer to an unexpected point of view, but its continuous influence is to point the writer to careful selection, explanation, and illustration in organizing his or her thinking. Because-clauses The spontaneous list of because-clauses, the "reasons" for a thesis, works on a number of different levels. By freely generating ideas you move beyond the anxiety of a blank page toward the center of gravity of your commitment to the project. Moreover, because-clauses provide some of the actual language for the raw draft. It's important to generate far more because-clauses than you need, before judging the material. If you are writing a three-page position paper, give yourself at least a dozen ideas to analyze; for a term paper of twenty-five pages, you might want to sketch out twenty-five ideas. The goal is to explore widely, discovering specific and general issues, and perhaps some examples. You also want to uncover your own feelings toward the material, those issues about which you have a good deal to say, and good reason to say it. You want to gather as much raw material as possible for discovering the project's center of gravity, and for the breadth, power, and clarity of your final draft. Analysis of the Because-clauses Once you have generated more than enough reasons to support your thesis, you can begin to select the best material to order into an argument-outline. Test each clause to see if it is true or useful in your argument, making notes to develop the ones that mean and matter the most. Analyzing the because-clauses reveals the writer's passion for a topic, the aspect of the thesis that will teach the writer the most, or that the writer most wants to explore. You see this clearly in the clauses that run on to paragraphs or pages. Because-clauses are the heart of the QUICK WRITING PROCESS system. They lead to meaning and they provide the language of fresh ideas. And fresh ideas are what you need. Imagine, for example, what it is like for a teacher to receive yet another set of papers on a topic given year after year. Most of the papers cover familiar ground, in familiar language. Even the selection of quotations from sources will be predictable. (Of course, the teacher could ask new questions, or think of new approaches to basic material; but, under pressure, many do not.) When you analyze your raw material, respect the fresh ideas which impart your own way of looking at familiar issues. Just as generations of students have been trained to evade responsibility for their words by the prohibition against using the first person singular pronoun, so, too, most people have been trained to neglect the very material that best represents their own thinking. The drabness in our private and public discourse to some extent reflects the devastating effects of this training. Take some risks in proposing your ideas; stretch too far, at least in generating raw material. Vision depends on it. Your own learning demands a larger context, linking your present argument, your struggle for meaning in a paper or memo or article, to the ideas and concerns that will endure beyond it. Analysis and Integration of the "Other Side" When writing under pressure, many people feel they should ignore evidence that runs counter to their argument: "Why should I spend valuable time making the case for the opposition?" But writing is different from face-to-face debating before an audience. If you can think of opposing arguments, so will your readers, even those inclined to agree with you. It is far better to acknowledge the other side and to integrate it into your own argument. Moreover, by generating some reasons for the other side, you discover fresh ideas for your own. If you leave too many unanswered questions about what you have failed to consider, or if you make a show of knocking down a straw man, you undercut your reader's trust. A convincing, honest look at the other side strengthens your argument, engaging readers, even those who may not agree with you. By including the other side in your introduction and exploring it at the beginning of your argument, you demonstrate on a structural level a confidence and power that naturally attracts readers. If you think of the extended provisional thesis as containing an although-clause first, and then several because-clauses ("Although' -----, it is better to -----, because: -----"), then you will have the structure for a reasonably comprehensive argument written under pressure. Argument-Outline Once you've analyzed the because-clauses, and selected your raw material, make a quick outline of your argument to establish coherence among your ideas. It often makes sense to put your most convincing point last in the middle section, where it will naturally lead the reader to your conclusion. (You may, of course, want to write the most important point first to develop it fully, and devote less time and energy to subordinate points.) Moreover, by grouping related ideas under headings in the quick outline, you create the separate phrases that combine to become the introduction and the transitions of your raw draft. Full Introduction Selecting and ordering the best of the raw material into an argumentoutline, including the other side, enables you to adapt your provisional thesis to the sense and sequence of your argument. Read the thesis back from the headings of your argument-outline, and then develop it, if appropriate (as in an article), into a full-fledged introduction. Filling in the Raw Draft; First Cuts Filling in the argument-outline with the blocks of selected material creates a raw draft much longer than you need. This gives you the freedom to cut freely, deleting passages that are inconsistent, tangential, or too abstract. This freedom to choose only the best material, one of the great benefits of QUICK WRITING PROCESS, is the exact opposite of what most people experience in revising. When an anxious writer cranks out a draft in a headlong rush, or piles up evidence and examples, revising almost always reveals the lack of planning. Usually, it's too late at that point to do anything about major weaknesses. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, you keep only the best material from your ample raw draft, balancing the specific with the general, and ensuring coherence and consistency among the parts. Feedback The questions a reader asks invariably elicit answers from the writer that ought to have been included in the writing. Such questions often chal- lenge parts of the argument the writer has taken for granted, or conflicts the writer has failed to resolve. Readers can also tell you where your language is unclear or lacking in vitality. This kind of feedback is a gift; one's writing is always stronger and clearer because of it. It's important to ask for it, and to make use of it. Second Reading The first cuts that transform the raw draft into a leaner, coherent, consistent roughly final draft leave some loose ends and missed connections. Although each piece of evidence in an argument should relate to what comes before and what comes after it, it also must be linked clearly with the overall thesis. At every point in the final product, the reader should be able to sense this unity: the clear relationship between evidence, example, and thesis. Moreover, unifying the elements of your argument, you gather momentum for a powerful conclusion that not only summarizes but creates a new perspective for the reader. Proofreading It is the writer's responsibility to present his or her reader with a flawlessly proofread document. In some cases, the absence of proofreading can put a whole project in jeopardy. There are readers who confuse proofreading with intelligence, who are more concerned with "errors" than with meaning. Such readers should be required, at the very least, to read what you have written as you meant it. A Writing Policy The process of writing well on time has a beginning, middle, and end in itself. You need to assimilate what you've learned and move on. You may or may not get a response from your intended reader. There may or may not be more work to do: more reading, writing, and talking about the subject; another essay, memo, or research article to write. But under pressure, a writer works with intensity and concentration, and it is important to let go once the project is finished. It takes skill and experience to permit yourself to do this, but it is crucial in fashioning a strong writing policy that allows you to approach each new project with increasing confidence, energy, and pleasure. |
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