Picture this: it’s three weeks into the semester and you’re facing down your first college-level writing assignment. Whether this is a research paper, a Think Piece, or a narrative essay, we’ve got some handy tips and tricks to get you started!
1. Get all the details.
Knowing everything you can about the assignment is going to make things a lot easier in the long run. Details and instructions can be found in several places; usually, they are on the assignment itself in Canvas, as well as the syllabus. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your professor, either. They want to see you succeed – they know everything about the assignment (they’re the ones who made it!) and are more than willing to share the nitty gritty details with you. Here are a few things you’re going to want to know about what you’re writing:
Format: Does your professor want MLA, APA, or something different?
Genre: Is this an argumentative research paper or a lab report? Are you writing an editorial piece or a lengthy literary analysis? Understanding the assignment genre will help guide your writing.
Technical Details: What’s the word requirement? How many sources are you supposed to have?
2. Figure out your topic, and outline it.
This is a key component in the writing process, because without it, you’ll have no idea where you’re going or even where to start! First, you’ll want to brainstorm your topic. What are you going to write about? What appeals to you? What topic has plenty of sources available for you to draw on?
Once you’ve decided, create an outline of what you want your paper to look like. It can be as bare as three or four bullet points, or you can go in-depth with topic sentences for each paragraph and jumpstart your research process by including links to sources. Outlining looks different for everybody – the goal is to have some guidance that can (and will) evolve as you develop your paper.
3. Jump into the writing!
You can start with your introduction, or dive straight into the body paragraphs. Writing doesn’t need to be linear, so go with whatever flow works for you. Remember, your first draft isn’t going to be perfect. The first draft exists so that you can get all your thoughts onto the paper – polishing and editing comes later in the process. As you write, keep the assignment guidelines in mind; your arguments, claims, and use of evidence should align with your thesis (a statement, usually in the introduction paragraph, that makes a claim about your topic and outlines how you’re going to back up that claim).
4. Bonus points: head over to the Write Site before you submit your paper to get advice and feedback from top-tier writers and English students.
The Write Site is a free service open to all Texas Woman’s University students (undergraduate and graduate) that assists with all aspects of writing. They help with big-picture issues (such as structure and argument development) to smaller scale items (like grammar and formatting). You can submit your first first or your final draft. The Write Site can work with whatever you’ve got in a face-to-face or online appointment! Whenever you get stuck, the Write Site and its well-trained writing consultants are a great resource to utilize to help get you past any writing block you’re facing.
College writing may seem daunting at first, but you’ve got plenty of resources behind you to help get you were you need to go. Best of luck!
Hello, folks! The semester is drawing to a close, and that means finals–for some of you, lots of finals at once. A lot of you will therefore be juggling multiple papers and studying for tests. That can be stressful! We at the Write Site don’t want you to burn yourself out, so here are some strategies you can use to help you manage multiple assignments at once.
Create an assignment calendar
Maybe you already have an assignment planner, maybe you don’t, or maybe you started one at the beginning of the semester and haven’t looked at it since week three (@ me…). Whatever the case, I cannot recommend enough that you sit down with the syllabi from each of your classes and write down every deadline listed for the papers you are working on. That includes outlines, drafts, peer reviews, update posts, presentations, and the finished papers. You can organize this into a calendar or a to-do list; just make sure you can see what kind of progress you need to be making for each class. This will help you to prioritize your work and avoid losing points for missing any smaller deadlines.
These little in-between deadlines professors often assign may seem like an annoyance while you’re trying to balance everything on your plate, but they exist for a good reason! Having concrete, graded milestones to ensure that you’re making some progress on your papers actually helps a ton. An annotated bibliography gives you sources to use in your paper as well as ideas for where you might want to take your argument. You may open up the “update discussion post” on Canvas and realize you haven’t thought about your paper in a week, but now at least you’re thinking about it, even if it feels like you’re just making something up for the grade. Maybe you are just making it up, but you can still use the ideas you come up with and get some feedback from your instructor! Additionally, oftentimes these little assignments are intended as a buffer for that final grade. That’s why it’s so important to keep up with these due dates and actually complete these assignments.
Block out some dedicated time to work on your assignments. Prioritize more urgent deadlines
Now that you have your calendar of due dates, you can start scheduling yourself some time to work on specific assignments. This may mean that you mark out a day for one assignment and a day for another, or it may mean going in and scheduling your week hour by hour to make sure your time is more firmly managed. Some people will find that having a more tightly scheduled plan reduces uncertainty (and, therefore, anxiety). Some people prefer to keep their plan looser so they don’t feel guilty if they stray from it. Either way works, but I absolutely recommend having some kind of work schedule to follow.
Looking over the deadlines, you can get a sense of what you need to focus on now and what you should save for later. This may seem obvious, but sometimes our brains tell us to work on things we consider more important (or easier) first. Blocking out time for things that are due sooner will help save you from last-minute crunch down the line. That brings me to my next point:
Any progress you make is a good thing
Say you followed the last step and blocked out time for the assignment that is due sooner. You get to your scheduled work time and open up the assignment, but you find yourself stuck and unable to make the progress you were hoping for. In this case, any kind of progress you can make will benefit you down the line, even if that means doing something small and moving onto the next assignment.
There are different small steps you can take to make writing easier when you return to an assignment later on. You could spend a few minutes using a brainstorming technique. You could create a to-do list or checklist with things you need to do for one particular assignment assignment. Maybe you could create an outline with ideas about how many pages each section needs to be. You could look for one scholarly source on the TWU databases and give it a quick read to see what the main idea of the article is. Even if you only get a little bit done, whatever you come up with will be processing in the back of your mind as you put the paper aside and do something else. You may find when you come back to it that you have even more ideas, or that your writing flows much easier than before.
Practice self-care
It’s easy to burn out when you’re juggling multiple finals at one time. It’s important to make sure you are taking breaks from writing to take care of your body and rest your mind. When I create a schedule for working on my own papers, I always make sure to leave time open to do something that isn’t work–take a nap or a hot bath, eat a snack, drink some water, go for a little walk. I always feel rejuvenated after a walk; if I take a break to watch an episode of Property Brothers, I find that my lack of momentum carries over into being unable to get back to work. Taking a walk gets me doing something, which makes transitioning back into school work much easier.
Leaving your schedule open for self-care is also easier when you start on things early–waiting until the last minute means less time for breaks, which makes burnout more likely. I get it, I’ve been there. Sometimes you find yourself drinking coffee in the library at midnight and asking where you went wrong. Trying to stick to your schedule may not feel like self care now, but it will make things easier for Future You. Future You will thank you for that. If you don’t want to let Future You down, remember: small progress is progress, and opening up your document and writing one sentence is better than not doing anything at all.
So, you want to write a blog, or you’ve been assigned one, but don’t know where to start or why a blog even matters. Well, if you think blogging is dead in 2020, then you’d be wrong. Blogging came into existence in 1994, by a student named Justin Hall, who just wanted a place to display his writing, but blogging has evolved over the years into microblogs (ex. Twitter and Instagram), tumblogs (ex. Tumblr), vlogs (ex. YouTube), and podcasts (ex. Spotify). Blogging is not just the place to find a great sweet potato pie recipe, but also a way to engage with like-minded readers, market a business, and practice writing skills. Blogging is an important resource and professors and universities often have their own blogging platforms that act as an “invisible college’…broadening education as whole, [and] taking it beyond…departments and universities.” There are a vast number of tutorials online about how to create a blog site and how to write a blog, but let’s focus on the main things every blogger should know when writing a blog.
Know Your Audience
A great blog is both educational and interesting, so when considering your audience, think “Who might need this information?” and “Who might find it interesting?” Typically, the audience is one in the same. Knowing your audience is marketing 101 and blogging is a business. Yes, of course, there are some that still use blogging as a diary, but blogging is also about branding, selling, and educating. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and consider what information would keep them on your page. Knowing your audience will also help you choose the tone and voice of your post. Blogs are less formal that academic papers, so the language tends to be more relaxed, but it’s important to consider your audience to know how relaxed your language should be. Also, knowing your audience will let you know what information they already know. Millennials probably don’t need a how-to on creating a social media page, but they might need to know how to tweak their pages to gain followers. Knowing who you’re talking to will help you make these subtle changes and create a more focused blog post, which leads us to the next point.
Choose a Topic and a Title
Chances are, you already know what you’re writing about. This is more about being specific. Amateur bloggers will write the content first, end up in left or right field somewhere, and then try to create a title that addresses all their excellent points.
Choosing a narrowed-down, granular topic, then creating a title that clearly conveys your message will focus your blog post and aid in keeping your audience engaged. Make sure your topic is something you find interesting because a lack of enthusiasm will kill your blog. Remember, you are writing for an audience and you don’t want Ben Stein’s “dry eyes” voice to pop into their head while reading your blog. Speaking of dry, choose a catchy title that would make you want to read your blog! You’re writing for like-minded individuals, so use a title that would catch your attention but also tells the audience (or hints) at what your post is about. Making it too vague can be misleading if the reader interprets your title one way but finds out your post is about something else. Go for attention-grabbing or thought-provoking, instead of mysterious.
Write an Outline
Organizing your post will keep the content clear and concise. A 2015 study by Microsoft found that the human attention span has decreased from 12 to 8 seconds. That’s it — just 8 seconds — so you don’t want to lose your audience with an overwhelming amount of content. Audiences often seek blogs for a specific purpose, and no one wants to scroll through an endless amount of content to find what they came for, so plan for between 800-1200 words. Maybe your topic has a lot of information. Consider breaking it down into sections and sub-sections that will make it easier to read. Now, you have your topic, title, and outline, but maybe you’re still struggling to make it interesting to both you and the potential readers. This next element will help move things along.
Use Anecdotes and Images
As mentioned before, blogging (in all its forms) is quite popular, so you don’t want your blog to end up a dead fish in an internet sea of endless blogs. There is an undeniable art and power to storytelling, and that power should be utilized in blogs. When I think of blogs, I think of Scheherazade. Audiences read through the stories she tells the king, night after night, just to get to the real reason they keep reading — to find out if the king is going to kill her that night. Yes, that looong story about grandpa’s farm at the beginning of your favorite blog, just to finally get to the recipe for butter, is the same formula Scheherazade uses, and it’s how some bloggers use anecdotes. It is a way to connect to readers. Also, stories are processed in the brain differently, so pull out some humor or a catchy story to grab and engage readers.
“The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No onewould or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.”
– David Mamet
The use of visual content —gifs, images, videos, etc. — will not only make a blog palatable and interesting, but also leads to an increase in readers. Use visual content thoughtfully with consistent headers and sub-headers, and well-placed images that add to your message.
Don’t Forget a Call to Action (CTA)
Here’s where you tell the audience what to do next and how to lead them to other parts of a blog or other post. For professional blogs, a blogger will tell readers to subscribe to their page or download free content, but other blog CTAs might encourage a reader to action, which is often seen in persuasive writing. For example, if the blog post is about politics, then the CTA might encourage people to vote. Sometimes, a CTA can be as simple as encouraging readers to “Learn More” or “Discover” a new topic. Check out this example of CTAs on this blog post on Electric Lit (see what I did there). You’ll not only see a section “About Recommended Reading” that tells readers to “Sign up” and “join our membership program,” but there are ads along the side to “donate” and “subscribe.” Also, CTAs is where the money’s at. You need to drive readership if you want to attract companies to advertise on your page (because we all love those ads…).
These are just a few ways to get started. Learning to blog will prove useful both academically and professionally because you want someone to see your work. Blogs use search engine optimization (SEO) which helps people find the content and information they need, and since Google isn’t going anywhere any time soon, it’s safe to say that neither is blogging. Think of it this way, when you’re trying to figure out how to use that InstaPot your mother just sent you, are you more likely to read the manual or find a blog or YouTube video? Exactly.
For some examples of blogs, I recommend these websites:
When writing an assignment, it is easy to think that your audience is your professor, but that is not the case. In most assignments given, you will have to choose who your audience is. While it’s always best to check with your professors, it’s really important to understand that audience shapes how you write: it sets up your tone, purpose, and context.
The purpose of your English class is to help you become an agile writer that can write in different situations and contexts, so if you keep imagining your audience as your professor, it might be difficult to transfer that knowledge to new, real-world writing situations. However, it’s hard to not think of your professor as your audience especially since you’re turning in your paper for a grade!
But when you write for your professor, you can either 1) not include enough information for the audience or 2) use too much jargon from your class that your audience may not be familiar with. Choosing an audience might feel weird. It may be something that you never thought of. A couple of theorists who explain ways to address an audience might be the help you need.
Many theorists have different perspectives on the topic—one is Walter Ong who states that the audience is fiction. What he means is that you make up your audience and when you do that, you often create values and needs for an imagined audience.
An example Ong gives is that sometimes when you write a letter—or text message—, you are already imaging the person you are writing to and how they would react to what you say. The point is that imagining an audience can help your writing! However, if you imagine your professor as your audience, you might only be envisioning how they will grade and how you have shown your mastery of the genre—and while that is a reasonable thought, to truly master a genre, you need to have a real audience in mind.
Another theorist is Peter Elbow! He explains that it is better to not have an audience in mind so that you can express your ideas in your first draft (Clark 111). But, this is only a first step because what tends to happen in a first draft, without an audience, is egocentric writing—writing for yourself.
That is, the first draft might be writer-based prose and not reader-based prose. Writer-based prose usually “omits contextual information or elaboration that an audience would need or includes information that an audience would not be able to understand without further explanation” (Clark 111). The next step after drafting without an audience is to revise and shape your writing to be reader-based prose—meaning, you add more information that the audience needs to know.
The next time you write a paper, try imagining an audience that isn’t your professor! Or, if you like to get your ideas on paper first, you can write for yourself and then imagine an audience as you revise.
References
Clark, Irene. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in The Teaching of Writing. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2012.
I haven’t been getting a lot of work done in the midst of the mandatory self-isolation due to COVID-19, but I am 100% sure I am not alone. I figured I would share what I have learned! I attempted to do some slight web-surfing on tips to fight writer’s block or procrastination, but a lot of the suggestions were “go to a book store,” “visit friends and family without using your car (train, airplane, or bus),” or “change your work scenery.” As awesome as all of this sounds, many of us are not able to leave our houses for a while; however, a lot of us are still working remotely or doing school assignments from home, and it can be hard just sitting around all day! So here are some ideas to get our creative juices flowing that will motivate us to get some words on the page.
Do something else!
I know this is vague, but what I mean is do something completely different. Don’t just work on a different assignment or scroll through social media. I mean do something weird. Get up and dance, talk to yourself (out loud), or practice your wide vocabulary. Get your brain thinking again! It is easy for all of us to just sit, stare at the computer screen, and eventually fall asleep due to complete boredom and no interest in your writing. Do something you wouldn’t usually do – surprise yourself!
Write something spontaneously creative!
I know what you are thinking; “Write something creative? How am I supposed to do that if I have writer’s block?” Here is what I am talking about: look around your room/office and pick something. It can be as insignificant as a winter scarf. When you think of a scarf what do you think of? Snow? Christmas? A specific memory? Write about it! Just start with the first sentence, and the flow will come. Trust your writing process. Once you write a short little creative piece and get your brain circulation flowing, you will have an easier time forming your arguments and getting that flow you want!
Brainstorm to some of your favorite music!
Instrumental music is really good for study time and keeping extreme focus, but it’s also great for thinking of new ideas and spawning interesting arguments. I think it is extremely beneficial to turn on a playlist you like on Spotify (that’s the app I like to use). For example, I was having a really hard time getting started on writing this blog post, but then I turned on one of my daily mix playlists. The music really helped me get some words on the page and think about how I might craft my argument.
For the love of creativity, write what you want to write!
If you have lost that spark you once had to write in your free time, my goodness just write what you want to write about! Stop thinking about the reader! I know that sounds bad but hear me out. It is so much easier to write when you care about what you are writing! Make it whatever you want! Talk about the controversial thing you really believe in! Use a cuss-word or two (or three)! If you start writing in your free time again and actually enjoy it, all of that formal writing you have to do will come much easier. Start practicing your writing again. It’s good for you!
Hopefully, this helps in fighting that writer’s block and procrastination. Right now is an extremely rough time for all of us, so utilize your time stuck at home to rediscover your passion for writing. I will leave you with this quote from Toni Morrison:
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
TWU Write Site 