Overview
This reading will explain the value of the prewriting process in creating a usable, college-level draft of an assigned piece of writing. We’ll discuss Assignment Analysis (Writing Situation), Idea Generation, Outlining Strategies, and Drafting.
To complete this reading, you’ll need to set aside time to complete the exercises assigned on paper or on a computer. Some exercises require you to time yourself at an activity, so having a clock or timer nearby will also be useful. You’ll be asked to briefly report your experiences at the end.
Assignment Analysis: Review
In your last reading, you discovered how to analyze a given assignment. Different textbooks and instructors have different names for this. It is sometimes also called Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation or Finding the Writing Situation. These all mean the same thing, and they all ask you to do the following:
- Create a Question to work with
- Fully comprehend all parts of the assignment
- Determine your audience (primary and secondary)
- Determine the purpose of the assignment
- Narrow or broaden your topic to fit the requirements
- Fully understand formatting, research, length, and time requirements
Once you’ve completed this, you’re ready to move into the most important stage of the entire writing process: Idea Generation.
Idea Generation
Where do good ideas come from? Well, for most of us, the best ideas we’ve come up with come from existing interests. If you have little interest in writing, then it’s hard to come up with what to write about.
Sometimes, the problem is the opposite thing: Given a prompt, we can come up with too many things to talk about. Having too little or too much to write about can be difficult, and the process of generating useful ideas will help you with either of these.
To begin generating ideas for an assignment, we need to work with the question that we created in our Assignment Analysis.
Let’s look at a typical College Writing prompt to get started. This is a question taken from an in-class final exam given to Writing 121 students a few years ago:
Describe one gift that you have. Reflect on how you have used that gift to make the world a better place.
A student taking the exam generated the following question from this prompt:
What personal gift have I used to improve the world, and how have I used it?
Now, some students will just jump right in and start answering that question. There are positives to this approach: certainly, the work gets started more quickly, and sometimes, that first instinct is the best guide. However, there are some downsides, too: Writing the first thing that comes to mind may lead to more shallow writing instead of the deep reflection that college courses ask for; the first idea one thinks of may not be the best, and it might not fulfill the requirements of the assignment.
So, to avoid these problems, we need to use this question to generate multiple possible ideas to write about, so that we can later narrow down to the best id