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| Producing: Amplifying Meaning |
| Before you compose the raw draft, write a compact "treatment," a narrative of the whole project in not much more than a page or two. Begin with your thesis, then describe the progress of your argument in the middle section, and propose your conclusion, the new perspective your paper or article will offer the reader. This treatment serves several good purposes. It provides a project narrative for reference; it forces an early examination of the balance and emphasis of your presentation; and it may well become the actual transition from the introduction to the middle section of your paper. (It could easily be the source for the abstract, or a proposal for publishing your article.) But there is a simpler, practical benefit that has to do with the anxiety of beginning a research paper. Usually, in whatever we write, the first few paragraphs (or in longer works the first several pages) actually serve to start the writer. We almost always abandon these pages later as we find the project's center of gravity. A treatment serves this catalytic function. A "Treatment" First Before you compose the raw draft, write a compact "treatment," a narrative of the whole project in not much more than a page or two. Begin with your thesis, then describe the progress of your argument in the middle section, and propose your conclusion, the new perspective your paper or article will offer the reader. This treatment serves several good purposes. It provides a project narrative for reference; it forces an early examination of the balance and emphasis of your presentation; and it may well become the actual transition from the introduction to the middle section of your paper. (It could easily be the source for the abstract, or a proposal for publishing your article.) But there is a simpler, practical benefit that has to do with the anxiety of beginning a research paper. Usually, in whatever we write, the first few paragraphs (or in longer works the first several pages) actually serve to start the writer. We almost always abandon these pages later as we find the project's center of gravity. A treatment serves this catalytic function. Drafting the Product Raw Draft Your notes are a quarry for excavating facts and examples. Research journal commentaries provide the internal glue of your argument in explanations and interpretations. It is a great pleasure to begin a research writing project with a stack of notes, commentaries, examples, and quotations sorted under the major themes in your outline. You can move confidently through the raw draft with the single purpose of developing meaning. Your project may require a particular format, but you will confront that issue in transforming the raw draft into the roughly final draft. Since the goal of the raw draft is to set out the material you have selected in the order of your argument, it will be longer than your final draft. Write freely, without unduly worrying about repetition, or consistency. For the raw draft, you simply want to get the selected material down on paper or up on the screen. Take delight in translating your notes and comments into solid evidence for the ideas that reveal your thesis to the reader. First Cuts The raw draft will be too long, somewhat inconsistent, perhaps repetitious here and there, and lacking some transitions. But this raw draft will contain your whole argument, in its most powerful order. Those two qualities ensure that you will get your project done well, on time. You can cut freely, without the familiar timidity or remorse people feel at "losing all that material." You have more than enough. You want to take out everything that doesn't count, that doesn't add to your method and to your meaning. If you have always been unsure about editing, this round of free cuts delivers you from the usual pressure and anxiety and allows you to see your writing from a reader's standpoint. You can distinguish between what was really a shorthand or truncated explanation for yourself, or a defensive argument with an imaginary reader, and what advances your argument in a publicly comprehensible way. You may find evidence scattered throughout the draft for another subject entirely, which could provide material for your next paper. But you remove it all from this draft without hesitation. In writing this book, for example, I have taken out far more material than I have left in. Some of the material I cut was really processoriented, resolving questions of method. But much of it was about the teaching of writing, a subject which has concerned me for almost thirty years (either as a victim or as a practitioner). I have kept only those teaching issues that seemed to me to illuminate the reasons why most people find writing such a struggle, especially under pressure. Although QUICK WRITING PROCESS lends itself easily to a supportive classroom setting, it is a system for anyone to adopt independently. This was the principle underlying my first cuts: to keep whatever material was necessary to enable any reader, whatever his or her background, or experience as a writer, to acquire QUICK WRITING PROCESS and adapt it to any writing situation. In what I deleted I have accumulated almost enough material for a book about the teaching and learning of writing in America. This is characteristic of QUICK WRITING PROCESS: shaping the research writing process around finding, developing, and presenting meaning yields enormous benefits beyond the present project. The Objective Listener You have been working with great concentration, discovering and developing meaning, and then playing it back in your own mind to see how clearly it sounds. At this point, it is extremely helpful to have someone else tell you how it reads. You may have talked through the topic even before you started to plan, or you may have had the consistent help of a teacher or a colleague throughout the process. But the cut raw draft is still malleable, and a reader may be able to tell you something useful about the inadequacy of an explanation, the need for an example, or an inconsistency in tone that helps you shape the cut draft into the roughly final draft in a clearer, more powerful way. The objective reader's function is to freshen your perspective on the writing. Almost always, the reader can help by telling you where transitions are missing, an idea is not linked to the thesis, or a particular passage would have more impact in another place. A reader can also tell you what is missing in the presentation of your method, the framework of your project. These questions about content or structure will give you insights into the way the writing reads that would be difficult to achieve on your own. In writing the drafts of this book, I sought feedback at several stages. Each time the reader's observations and questions sharpened my perspective. Of course, if you bog down in the writing, feedback from an objective listener is essential. I began Chapter 11 with an imaginary conversation that resolves a research writing block. But any piece of writing can stall for a time while ideas mature, or the writer's approach crystallizes. We all have been trained to write in artificially compartmentalized stages in which it is easy to lose concentration, instead of in a continuous process. Talking through a problem saves you time and energy and sharpens your perspective on the continuous struggle to link specific issues to overall themes. When my tennis teacher calls out, "Turn your shoulder!" after I've hit a weak forehand, it restores my concentration. The same sort of thing holds true for writing. Even if you know better, from experience, you may convince yourself your notes are good enough and you don't need an outline, or that you really know the subject and can just sit down and write. Someone outside the process can remind you of what you have neglected, or where you took a short cut and got lost. Talking your way through a problem with an objective listener is a reality test: if he or she can follow you, then you have a good indication of an appropriate fit among your ideas, your written words, and your reader's understanding. Improving the Roughly Final Draft Once you have removed what doesn't fit in the draft, and gotten feedback from an objective listener, reconnect what does fit. In effect, you have freed the figure from the stone, the essential argument from its more amorphous context in which there may have been confusions, undeveloped or unexplained fragments, repetitions, and distractions. Your cuts have ensured coherence and consistency among the parts of the argument. Each part fits what came before it, and leads clearly to what comes after. Now you want to bind the parts of your argument together into a unified, smoothly flowing draft. At every point in your paper or article, your reader should be able to relate the specific fact, explanation, or example to your overall thesis. This means writing solid transitions which explicitly refer to the framework underlying the whole project. Anchor every example in the overall argument, and make sure that the importance and relevance of each illustration, diagram, and table is clear. You may have to enlarge, or alter the tone of the introduction, or strengthen your conclusion. Readers of papers habitually skim beginnings and endings before they read through the argument, and you want to be sure everything is there, in compact form. You need to test the relevance of every piece of structure in this roughly final draft, from the introductory section, to the development of themes, the running commentary on method, the examples, the specific conclusion, and the broader perspective you hope to provide your reader. Furthermore, you want ample paragraphs, clear and varied sentences, vital language, and helpful punctuation. Finally, you need to be certain that your references and quotations are accurate, extending to the reader the opportunity to use your research as a springboard to further study. Then, of course, have someone proofread the final draft. Product and Policy The QUICK WRITING PROCESS method should be especially useful for people who have viewed research writing as chaotic or unmanageable. The underlying principle is that research writing is a continuous process in which the writer simultaneously discovers meaning and prepares it for presentation. Finding facts, ideas, and examples, the writer shapes the most effective product for sharing them with a reader.This synergism at the heart of research writing explains why some people find such pleasure and excitement in every project, no matter what the format, or how much patience or meticulousness the work requires. Even the painstaking introductory section of a long paper, chronologically reviewing earlier research and providing a clear rationale for taking up the subject within that context, can be imbued with the style and tone of your argument, as any article in Scientific American demonstrates.Most people never experience the enlightenment and stimulation of authentic research writing; those who do usually discover it on their own. The QUICK WRITING PROCESS research writing agenda leads the writer to discover meaning, and to present that meaning as discovery for his or her readers through an improvable, adaptable system. It is one of the most powerful accomplishments of an independent writer. |
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