What to Do Before Handing in Your Paper
1. Research thoroughly before beginning to write. Take notes
as you read.
2. Define your audience and specify the main theme or thesis.
This is your "working" introduction. Make sure that
your purpose is clear in your own mind.
3. Brainstorm, identifying all main topics and supporting arguments.
4. Make a plan (outline) based on your research and the topics
you identified by brainstorming. Subdivide your plan to establish
every important point you wish to make as well as the necessary
supporting evidence.
5. Construct the paper by sections, using your plan and doing
additional research as necessary. Expect to rewrite. Use
the "working" introduction (from 2 above) to keep the
main theme in mind as you write. For now, forget about the formal
introduction, the conclusion, and the abstract.
6. Edit. Edit. Edit.
7. Write and edit the introduction, conclusion, and abstract.
8. Proofread the final typescript carefully. You are responsible
for typographical errors.
I. Defining Your Audience (pp. 58-59, 85-87)
* Consider your audience as a composite person; think concretely
about who that person is and what that person is like. Then write
for that person. In particular, for your project, write as if
your audience is a management review committee, composed of two
types of people: those that know the business well but don't know
much about computers, and those that know computers well, but
don't know much about the business. That means you must write
the business sections and the computer sections thoroughly,
without inside references that will confuse one of those two types
of people. If you have questions about this, let's talk.
* Ask yourself questions about your audience: How well do your
readers know the subject? Will they be receptive to your argument
or will they need hard convincing? What information, if any, does
the audience already know about the subject? What information
will you be expected to provide? What preconceptions and prejudices
does the audience have?
* Let the answers to these questions determine your paper's
message, the topics you include, the order of presentation, the
depth of detail, and even the tactics you use to present your
argument. At every new point in the paper, ask yourself about
what your readers need to know. Then tell them.
* Do not begin to outline or to write until you know who the
audience is and until you can answer most of the questions above.
II. Brainstorming
Brainstorming involves generating raw ideas, compiling them, and
expressing on paper your many disorganized thoughts, words,
and sentences. Using your research and your knowledge of your
audience, identify topics to be covered and points to be made.
Don't try to judge among ideas at this point--just get as much
as possible in writing for later reference.
III. Making the Plan (pp. 87-91)
After brainstorming, you can begin to design your paper. Any kind of ordered list of main points constitutes the plan (for the geniuses, lists kept in memory might work). Then break down the list into ordered sub-lists of points. Those sub-lists may be further divided as far as necessary-perhaps as far as the level of single sentences.
Designing a paper is much like designing any product in that you should always begin by identifying its main function. With a paper, that function consists of your comprehensive message, or the major point you wish to make. Then construct the paper in modules. Each module develops a point which supports the paper's thesis, and is, in turn supported by modules at a lower level. Once you get any module well-planned, you can begin to write it. Your plan, however, must illuminate the context surrounding the module you are working on. The modules must be placed in the proper order to present your points in logical sequence. You must have fairly specific knowledge about what comes immediately before and after each module, and you must have a general idea of how the module relates to the whole.
You may ask, why all the emphasis on making a point as early as the planning phase? Well, that is what is involved in rhetoric, the art of persuasion. You want to persuade your audience to accept your point of view on a theme, to act in a certain way, or simply to recognize that you have a valid point of view. To do that in technical writing, you must organize (make your plan) and use concrete evidence (include examples, illustrations, statistics, quotations, analogies).
Having a plan can forestall many problems, including the tendency
to let one part of your paper grow out of proportion to the whole
and the phenomenon of writer's block, which often causes difficulty
in dealing with early sections of the paper. As you write, and
later as you edit, use the plan as a check. Once you have a good
plan or outline, writing the first draft should come easily.
IV. Writing the First Draft
This section highlights the important points made in The
Art of Technical Writing about sentences, paragraph construction,
word choice, and effective transitions.
A. Paragraphs (pp. 92-99)
A paragraph should be concerned with one topic. This topic provides unity for the paragraph. One sentence in the paragraph, called the "topic sentence," should express the main point succinctly, and that sentence should appear either at the beginning or the end of the paragraph--preferably at the beginning. Every sentence in the paragraph should develop or support, through evidence, the main point or topic. The sentences should be ordered correctly so that they lead naturally from one point to the next. This provides coherence for the paragraph. You should reinforce this coherence through the use of transitional expressions within the paragraph. Transitions also serve as important links between paragraphs, smoothing the flow of ideas.
Vary the length of paragraphs. A typed page (250 words) makes
a good maximum length. On the average, paragraphs are probably
most readable at 100-150 words, or from four to six sentences.
Readers need the visual relief and content pauses that new paragraphs
provide.
B. Sentences (pp. 100-112)
Sentences, the material from which paragraphs are made, are the smallest independent units of writing. They stand alone because they express a complete idea and contain one dominant thought. The main point of a sentence occurs in the main clause. Avoid sentences like the following one, taken from an essay about poor management:
"The customer order entry process is slow and inefficient due to the fact that the supervisor is inexperienced in customer service."
You can see that the main idea is buried in the subordinate clause. Now note how rephrasing shifts the focus of the sentence to clarify the author's main idea, and condenses the action into one clause:
"The supervisor's lack of customer service experience impedes the customer order entry process "
The revision has moved the dominant thought to the beginning of the sentence, where it is highlighted in the subject.
Two of the most common grammatical problems are faulty parallelism and awkward shifts from active to passive voice. Parallelism, or the use of similar grammatical constructions for related ideas, reinforces unity and coherence in a paper. Lack of parallelism can disrupt the reader's thinking by making similar ideas seem dissimilar. Parallel constructions comes easily to most writers, even when they don't have much technical knowledge of grammar. You can probably tell immediately how to fix the faulty parallelism in this sentence:
"Hiring, firing, and to solve I.S. personnel problems is the job of the assistant manager. "
Simply replacing "to solve" with "solving" makes the sentence parallel, though it may neither improve the description of the job nor make the sentence much less wordy.
Another sentence problem, inappropriate use of the passive voice, is especially insidious in technical writing because the passive voice appears so frequently in manuals and reports that we scarcely notice it. Today, the passive voice has its place in technical writing, as it has in all writing, whenever an action and the thing-acted-upon are more important than the actor.
You must learn to recognize the passive voice before you can decide if it is awkward or inappropriate. In a simple sentence written in the active voice, the actor is named by the grammatical subject of the sentence. In the example below, the consultant is the actor:
"The consultant recommended a new order processing system. "
The action is named by the verb, "recommended," and the thing-acted-upon, "order processing system," is the direct object. Written in the passive voice, the same sentence looks like this:
"A new order processing system was recommended by the consultant. "
Now the actor becomes the obscure object of a preposition, the thingacted-upon becomes the subject, and the verb appears as a past participle which follows a form of the verb "to be" (usually, past participles end in -ed or -en). A common shorter form of the sentence omits the actor altogether:
"A freeze on hiring was recommended. "
Here, the past participle and form of "to be" alone signal the passive voice.
In either case, you can see that the passive voice generally is more awkward than the active voice. It can slow and dull your style, whereas the active voice lends grace and "muscle" to your writing. When you recognize the passive voice by its grammatical signals, ask whether the actor is really unimportant and, if so, rethink the sentence to find a way of turning the more important thing-acted-upon into the actor.
Here is one final thought. Be concise. Ask yourself this question:
which word or words can I remove without sacrificing the sense
of the sentence? Experts in writing comprehension suggest that
a sentence of around 17-25 words is easily understood; longer
sentences give some readers problems.
C. Word Choice or Diction (pp. 113-118)
Conserve space and time by using clear, specific, active, concrete
words. Put the energy of sentences into nouns and verbs. Choose
exact words; don't make your reader guess your meaning. Avoid
"big" words unless they are exact and have no simpler
equivalent. Aim your words at your audience: "disintermediation"
may mean something to an economists, but "taking money from
the bank to invest in bonds" is clearer despite its greater
length, for the average reader. Above all, represent ideas in
concrete terms, not in abstract ones.
D. Transitions
Transitions are so important that they could be emphasized in almost every section of this handout. The section above on paragraphs provides some information about transitions. But how do transitions come to be? They arise out of the natural ordering of ideas; hence they begin to take shape in the plan or outline.
Toward the end of developing the plan, try to indicate with brief notes and comments the relationship(s) between one module and the next. These notes will provide the basis for writing transitions, which are the "glue" of paragraphs. The more you can make your transitions substantial--that is, having to do with content--the better your paper will flow and the less aware your reader will be of breaks between sections.
Finally, there is nothing wrong with using headings to suggest
major sections of your paper--as I have done in this guide.
V. Editing the Draft (pp. 63-65, 142-151)
Editing begins after you have completed the first draft of the paper. To increase your objectivity, leave the draft for a time before beginning to edit. Then begin to rewrite sentences, replace inappropriate words, fill in overlooked details, and remove unnecessary words. This is what editing is all about.
Editing requires three different types of reading. The first
is reading for content. In reading for content, ask these
questions:
* Are there any unsubstantiated assertions? Is evidence lacking?
In other words, do any of the key premises in an argument or discussion
rely on inferred knowledge of the reader for their validity? They
shouldn't.
* Do any of the arguments fall prey to gross generalizations
or prejudicial statements? For example: "Everyone who uses
this system thinks that...." Well-tempered, perhaps humbler,
statements are preferable.
The second reading of the draft deals with style. Style
concerns the choice of words, the flow of ideas, the construction
of sentences, and the structure and main point of each paragraph.
Editing for style, especially removing unnecessary words, is the
most exacting kind of editing. Read with these questions in mind:
* Have you written a paper which the reader can follow?
* Are there any words which cloud the ideas and content of
the paper?
* Are there repetitive words, phrases, or sentences which contribute
nothing to coherence but only make the paper wordy?
* Can you find explanations which are either too elementary
or too advanced for the audience?
* Can you join the ideas in two or more sentences to make one
less wordy sentence which clearly expresses the ideas?
* Does each sentence really mean something? Test for this by
trying to say the same thing in other words.
* Do the flow of ideas and the structure of the paper enhance
or detract from your points?
* Can the reader always tell what point is being made?
The third reading, for detail, concerns such naturally troublesome areas as spelling, punctuation, correct references, and inclusion of cited figures and tables. Note that this is the last stage of editing. Editing for detail is important, but hardly as important as editing for correct content and effective style.
In summary, the first draft should be read several times: once
for content, once for style, and once for detail.
Successful writing requires that the writer, never the reader,
assume responsibility for editing.
VI. A Note on Abstracts, Introductions, and Conclusions
With the first draft completed and editing well begun, you can turn your attention to polishing your final introduction, conclusion, and abstract. You may have written a working introduction and conclusion when you did the first draft; you now must refine. Regardless of when you craft your introduction and conclusion, you must write them to mirror the body of the paper.
The introduction, conclusion, and abstract go through the same
processes --planning, writing, and editing--as the body of the
paper. When editing them, consider these additional questions:
* Does the abstract clearly identify the topic to be addressed
and set forth the significant contributions of the paper?
* Does the introduction justify the existence of the paper
by making the reader see the need for the discussion it contains?
Is the main point clearly announced?
* Does the conclusion restate the main point? Does the body
of the paper justify the conclusion?
Now, give the paper a title that accurately states its topic, and make the final typescript. Proofread the final, typed copy carefully; you have put too much work into the paper to let it be marred by carelessness now.