Have a paper due that you are dreading? Don't know where to begin? Or maybe you are stuck with the ever-loved writers block. Maybe I have what you need.
These are a few of my rules that have helped throughout my writing process. Many other writers share some of these selfsame rules, but I hope that you will find them as useful as I have.
1. Deadlines and Time Management
These are extremely important to getting work done efficiently and on time. This is also something I need to work on from time to time. Deadlines can ensure that parts of a group project are done in time for the meeting and collaboration. Also, they can let a person whittle away at a project so cramming does not occur
2. Drafting, Revising, and Outlining
Before a work can be truly completed, there are many revisions that may (or should) take place. A teacher once told me that you cannot write a good paper the night before. There needs to be many different iterations of the same work, or minor changes throughout. This will lead to a better polished final product. So the process of drafting different papers of the same work will lead to better overall craftsmanship. It may even lead to something the writer had not expected.
3. Reading Your Work Out Loud
There are some errors, I find, that a person’s brain simply corrects itself. This happens when someone has read their paper in their head so many times, they simply cannot see the error. But once it is read out loud, even it is only them, errors and problems with world flow can be found.
4. Peer reviewing
Having an extra set of eyes is always helpful. Just as reading a work out loud can help catch problems, so too can having others editing another’s work. A person can always do side-shadowing to help point the editors in the right direction. This is to get help on things that the writer is actually having problems with.
5. Brainstorming and Hand Writing
Sitting down and brainstorming ideas for a project is something that has always greatly helped me. It lets a person get out all those crazy project ideas until, like a diamond in the rough, one shoots out at them and that’s the one.
6. Mentor Texts
An easy way to get a good grasp of the format and style of the paper a person is writing is through mentor texts. They can show a person what accomplished authors are using, and how effective (or ineffective) they are. It also shows the writer information about the demographic that they are writing for. For there to be an apprentice, there has to be a master. The same follows for writing.
7. Sentence Level Editing
Last semester brought me a new kind of revising that has made my papers flow better than they averagely do. It has also greatly increased the diversity of my grammar and keep a consistent tense throughout the whole paper. Take a sentence, piece by piece, and see how it can be improved.
8. Hand Writing
Writing things by hand has been, for me, one of the better ways to correlate my ideas into one cohesive mass. It also helps my memory, as it is something I am doing with my hands and have a thought tied to the action. It also lets me insert other things where necessary, and gives more freedom than a writing on a computer screen.
