Drafting Your Essay

Brainstorming

Prewriting

Outlining your Argument

Fidgeting with Your Pen

Procrastinating

Creating an outline and developing a draft are two very important aspects of the writing process, but most writers ignore this stage of the work.  This is a bad idea, in my opinion, and might derive, in part, from the common use of the term “prewriting” to refer to these activities.  Even while I will use it in the materials which follow, I will admit that this term is misleading: there is nothing “pre-“ about outlines and drafts; similarly, it would be incorrect to call revising and proofreading your work “post-writing” since it is very difficult to imagine a strong essay that has not been revised and proofread.  Because the early stages of the writing process can be very time-consuming and have a tentative quality about them, students are tempted to ignore them.  Also, and this is not a criticism, it is very easy for students to divide the essay writing process into the following steps:

Outlines and Drafts: Things I Can’t Hand In
First Draft: Thing I Can Hand In
Second Draft (after Proofreading and Revising): Thing I Won’t Do Because I Already Have Something to Hand In (or, I’ve Already Handed In)…Hey Look, A Buffy Re-run (OK, that last bit was a criticism…)

Prewriting is, in my view, the process by which a good essay becomes an excellent essay, or a passable essay becomes a decent one.  What you do when you are prewriting will determine, by and large, the scope of your essay, the overall argument that you pursue, and the unity or coherence of the piece of writing. Coherence is a good thing.

We have a misconception about writing, and it is premised on the notion that effective writing goes from “Rough Draft” to “Polished Essay.”  The rhetoric shows clearly here: the document starts life as unrefined and moves to a state of clarity, conciseness, completion.  However, this is incorrect.  The early stages are not “rough” or ignorable; they are in every way primary.

Prewriting is not preparing to write an essay.  It is not reading or re-reading the story or poem or whatever you are writing on.  It is not buying paper, or smokes, or beer (although all of those may be necessary provisions).  It is not doing research, or talking to your friends, a tutor, or a professor about the assignment.  Prewrting is what you do in the earliest stages of the production of your essay to map out the document that will form itself as you proceed.  Imagine two people that are trying to get from Montreal to Edmonton.  One person has a great sense of direction and an intuitive sense of how to get from point A to point B.  The other person has a map, and a less well-refined sense of direction.  In this example, intuition is comparable to writing skills, and the map is, well, the map.  My money is on the person with the map.

Prewriting: A Practical Guide

I have found that there are at least five steps that should be pursued as you prewrite your paper: clarifying the question, developing your ideas; organizing them into paragraphs, writing your introduction, and writing your conclusion.  Five sounds like a lot, or at least enough to dissuade people from pursuing this approach to writing, but some of them take less than 5 minutes.  Some of them take hours.  You have to decide how much time you are going to devote to your essay, 

Working Tip:  If you have a friend in this class or any other who is also working on an essay, it might be a good idea to schedule a time when you can both meet at the library to work together.  You will not be helping each other with your respective papers (or at least not in a way that would contravene a university policy) but you would be setting up, in advance, a block of time that you would commit to this task.  In the same way that going to the gym is easier if you have someone to go with (or so I’ve been told) working on longer projects is easier if you are out of your house, away from distractions, and with a friend who can share your misery.

Clarifying the question

You need to take some time, at the very beginning of the process, to clarify the question and the assignment for yourself.  The topic as assigned is meant to provide latitude to students who will need to focus it more concisely.  Often times, this might take the form of actually answering the implied question of the topic (the Faulkner topic) but it might also mean that you define key terms in the question and think about how they might be represented in the text under consideration.  You might also define a term, and then pursue the question of how it is re-defined in the work.

Problems that Issue from not Clarifying the Question:

Summary of the work
	Submitting an essay that really only retells the story.  If you have too many phrases like “later, the narrator…”; “Afterwards, Bartleby…” then you are probably retelling the story.

Overly general essays
“Gilman’s story is about how you go crazy if you can’t be yourself.”

Unambitious and Impersonal Essays
“Gilman uses three symbols to suggest the gothic quality of the story…”

Collecting material from the work: Quotations, plot points, trajectories…

Is the narrator speaking?  A character?  Is the context of the quotation important?  Is it near the beginning of the work or the end?  Do we have reason to doubt what is being expressed?  Is there connotative significance?  If not, do you really want to use this material in your paper?

Proofreading Tip: Re-read all of your quotations.  Do they really demonstrate what you are using them to demonstrate?  If not, you may need to rethink your essay, or you may simply need to delete this aspect of your discussion, provided you are confident that your overall argument is sound.

Developing your ideas: The progression of concepts

The originator of this fateful phrase is Murray MacArthur at the University of Waterloo.  Murray was a good man, or so it seemed at the time, and learning this concept from him has helped me be a better writer and teacher of writing.  What does it mean?

It means that your essay has to move towards the most complex, or significant, or detailed, or even interesting (although you will use other terms than this to express it—more on this in a bit) aspect of your discussion or understanding of the work.  In practice, it also usually means that you are going to move from the text to the subtext, from the denotative to the connotative, or from the words on the page to the point that the author is  making (about people, or society, or the economy, or depravity, or the economy as the place of depravity, or poetry, or all of the above).  There is very little other than this to literary criticism; conversely, there is no way to produce a really good essay without doing this.

Your discussion does not start at an uninteresting or insignificant point, of course, but it nevertheless moves toward something that is more involved than a cursory reading of the story would reveal.  What starts to happen when you look at early passages from the work in the light provided by later passages?  What happens when you look at the beliefs that a character might hold early in the story versus those beliefs later in the work?  If we can not really discern those beliefs later, what is that telling us about what the author is doing in the work?  There are very few mistakes or oversights in the works we are reading this year, so if something is absent that we might expect later in a work, you can speculate that the author is trying to signal something by its omission.

You should also move towards the subtext, or the larger point of the work, as your essay progresses.  Note: once you discover what this larger point is, and discovering this is basically the goal of the entire prewriting activity, it becomes the central idea of your paper (you do not hide it until the end).  I do not want to overstate the significance of finding this idea, but it becomes the hammer of Thor, or the arc-thingy from Raiders of the Lost Arc.  In fact, there are times when I think that whole movie is about essay writing.  Spiderman, too.

Organizing your thoughts into paragraphs

If you have taken the first step seriously, you probably have more material than you can now use for your essay.  You do not stop collecting material when you have enough for the paper; rather, you stop when you feel that you have a good sense of the overall point of the work, or the overall significance of the specific aspect of the work that you are discussing in your paper.  So, if you are writing about a short poem, you will probably want to work and re-read and collect material until you have a good sense of the overall meaning of the poem.  If you are writing about one aspect of a short story—say, the South in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”—you may focus your thoughts on something more specific.  Even here, though, I would issue a proviso.  A really great essay will integrate Faulkner’s (or, better, the narrator’s) remarks on the South with that overall reading of sexuality and domesticity (or some other point) that comes through in the story.  So, you might collect quotations that specifically refer to the South in the story, and, while organizing them, you might find that they are all starting to sound the same.  If so, you might end up writing an essay that is very repetitive and not really progressing toward a greater insight.  If so, you have to stop and think about the place of this aspect of the story within the larger issues that Faulkner is bringing to foreground.

Coherence within Paragraphs and Coherence Between Paragraphs

Nothing in writing is more important than this.  Making certain that each paragraph sticks to the point that you have raised in your topic sentence, and making sure that each topic sentence relates to the larger whole of your discussion, is absolutely central to effective writing and argumentation.  Remember, a good essay is not simply one that is well written and even well organized, but one that has a strong, well supported argument coming through the good prose.

Proofreading Tip: Re-read all of your topic sentences and only your topic sentences.  Now re-read your thesis statement and then your conclusion.  Is everything there working together?  If not, you have some work to do.  If so, you are ready to move onto your introduction.

Writing your introduction

But wait!  You shouldn’t be writing your introduction until after your essay has settled a bit in your mind.  Do not write your introduction or conclusion on a day, or in a writing session, that has seen you working on your paper.  Stop, drop, and roll.  Come back tomorrow, or the next day if you have to work.  There are practical reasons not to write your introduction now, and they relate to the balance of your paper and the reflection of that balance in your introduction.  You don’t want your introduction dominated by the idea of a single paragraph (the last one you worked on) so it is best to get that right out of your mind before going on.

[24 hours later—of so the caption in the movie would read]  Now that you have a good sense of your overall essay, and you have paragraphs that are either drafted or perhaps fully written, you can write your introduction.  If you try to write your introduction before your essay, you will end up with something that is probably overly-general.  If you plan to write it first as a guide and then go back and re-write it, you are showing too much faith in yourself.  You are weak (if nobody has told you that before, I am telling you now).  The lure of moving on, and the seductive power of having words on the page that look like they are finished, polished, etc. is a very strong one--hence the word “seductive.”  Instead, you want to wait and only write the introduction and thesis statement after you know the overall argument of your paper. 

But why?

Your introduction and your conclusion are obviously the two most important parts of your essay, probably because they are the two parts where you do not simply discuss the work itself, but also give your reader a sense of how you are going to go about this, or how you did it.  Has this ever been explained to you about writing?  There are two distinct voices that you use in your essay: the first, and most dominant, is the voice you use to discuss the primary work.  The second is the voice you use to communicate to your reader how you will go about (or went about) this task.  In research papers, you will also use this voice to comment on the argument that you have found in critical or theoretical works, but for our purposes here, you will use a slightly different tone in the conclusion and the introduction.  This does not mean that you use cumbersome phrases like “In this essay, I will…”  However, you adopt a slightly different tone here, and work to convey what is in your paper, not simply what is in the work.  You can do this without saying “In this essay…” but it might take time to determine how.  A sentence that begins, “For Faulkner, the decay and disorder of the American South was amply demonstrated….” is really about your paper and the approach, even if it seems like it is about the story itself.  Nowhere in the story do characters or the narrator sit around and talk about decay and disorder.  That is being brought out in your essay.

Writing your conclusion

Nobody would attempt to write a conclusion until after they had written the essay.  If they do, they are sick.  Sick, I say.