Step #1 Prewrite

Yes, you hear your instructors tell you all the time to prewrite, but do you ever listen to them? Prewriting (which is listed in another blog) is not just a way to organize your thoughts and get down ideas, it is another way to look at your writing project and force yourself to write. Getting past your writer’s block is often just a matter of looking at your task from a different perspective (or looking around your writer’s block, if you will). If you can brainstorm or outline some ideas for your writing, then you have a better chance at feeling confident and putting your pen to the paper to start writing. With all of the different methods of prewriting, there really isn’t any reason not to use at least one of them when you’re stumped.

Step #2 Write Backwards

Even after the prewriting is finished, you may still feel uncertain how you want to word your thoughts exactly. If that’s the case, jot down your ideas out of order – write the end first and the beginning last if you must. Sometimes your ideas may be scattered, which is why you are having trouble focusing on just one idea. Maybe your mind is blank with your introduction, but you know what you want to write for your body paragraphs. If that is the case, then just skip ahead. Write down whatever good ideas you think you have and reorganize them later.

Step #3 Take Your Opposing Side

If you are really uncomfortable with your topic and feel you have absolutely nothing to write about, then you may want to take yourself out of your own head and put it into someone else’s. This has nothing to do with cheating. You are supposed to write the opposite of what you really feel. Or, think of what other people would say about your subject. It may be easier putting down what you think other people feel or believe than what you actually believe. Your confidence in your own ideas may be what stops your writing. Do not use this technique all of the time though. There are some assignments where you need to give your honest opinion, and this method of breaking writer’s block may not always be suitable.

Step #4 Just Write!

It may sound harsh, but sometimes you just have to force your pen to move on the paper or to have your fingers move across the keyboard. Often people refuse to write anything because they don’t think their ideas or words are good enough. Well, when you’re struggling, writing something is better than writing nothing. Put down whatever comes to mind whether or not you think it sounds good. You can always fix it later, which is how we come to Step 5 in breaking the writer’s block.

Step #5 Walk Away… and Come Back

Sometimes students are just not in the right state-of-mind to write. If there are a bunch of things running through your head, you may need to just set up your writing assignment as best as you can and walk away from it for a while. When you come back to whatever writing you have put down, you may feel more inclined to fix your ideas and even add more ideas down on paper. Depending on how much time you have for your writing, walking away from your assignment for an hour or a full day may be just what you need to come back to your writing and look at your project with a clear head. When you come back to your writing, look it over with a critical eye, as if it were someone else’s paper, and see what you do and do not like about it. And then, take your writing from there. Unless you are taking an in-class essay, this method can be a great way to clear your mind. Otherwise, you’ll have to rely on a different method of break down that writer’s wall.

Although many students don’t like the idea of doing extra work before they actually start their homework, writing an impressive essay actually requires putting in a little extra effort prior to putting  together a final draft. Prewriting techniques involve warming up your – the student’s – brain, organizing ideas, and setting up a plan before diving straight into writing a composition. It may take just a little extra time, but you will find that if you practice some prewriting  before every essay you write, your papers will be better written overall, which will in effect give a better overall grade. Ten or fifteen minutes of extra work may be the difference between a B and an A grade for your paper. And, with all of the different techniques you can use to prewrite, there really is no excuse not to use at least one of them.

Brainstorming

Writing down every idea that is related to your topic in a list form is one of the simplest forms of prewriting, which is called brainstorming. The great thing about brainstorming is that you can put anything in the list that pops into your head. If your topic is on birds and you have random thoughts like,

-They fly

-They’re pretty

-They squawk

-They poop on people’s heads

All of those things would be fine because your brainstorming ideas are related to your topic on birds.

Mapping, Clustering, Bubbling, Webbing

It has several different names, but whatever you want to call it, it is one of the quickest ways to organize ideas in a fun manner. Circling ideas and linking the related ones that surround your main idea is a messy way to be organized… which ends up feeling a lot more enjoyable than most homework does. And, since your related ideas are clustered together, your separate body paragraphs are already prepared for you. What’s better than a prewriting technique that’s fun and easy?

Free Writing

There is nothing more freeing than knowing you can write whatever you want without worrying about grammar, spelling, structure, or coherence. That is the joy of free writing – you are free to make mistakes and write whatever you want. The trick is to force yourself to continually keep your pen on the paper and write whatever thought comes to mind, while trying to think of your essay’s subject. You may go off topic at times, but that is okay. You do not want to stop or correct your free writing because you may lose a train of thought that could be useful to you later. Just force yourself to keep writing, and you will eventually have enough material to use in your composition. By reading over your free writing afterwards, you should highlight or underline any ideas you find useful to your essay.

Outlining

Although outlining is more structured than other forms of prewriting, it is a very useful format to use in order to have your essay organized prior to writing your essay, which was explained in a previous “how-to” (see “Writing Outlines”). Outlines also help your essay stay on topic. By outlining your body paragraphs with their specific points, it is easy to just refer to your ideas written in your outline before you begin writing your composition.

Asking Questions

Sometimes the only way students will work is if they feel they are being forced to. Asking yourself questions is a way to make yourself feel forced into coming up with ideas for your essay. The standard reporter’s questions – Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? – are great ways to begin asking yourself questions about your topic. If you are still writing a composition about birds, ask yourself, “Who likes birds?” or “What kinds of birds are there?” or “Where do birds live?” Obviously, you can bend these questions to your own needs; these are just ways to force yourself into coming up with answers that will inevitably lead to ideas for your essay.

Unlike high school book reports, college papers require in-depth interpretation of readings at hand. The term close reading is one that doesn’t often come into play in a high school environment, though in college, close reading is the expected norm. Close reading is the careful reading of a text that considers everything from syntax to structure to, basically, everything about the language down to the minutiae of a single word. Not only are college students expected to do close readings of texts, but they are also expected to interpret the text — not just describe what happens. College papers are very much “show, don’t tell.” College writers don’t repeat synopses of chapters in their papers; they interpret the text and only write, in their papers, about ideas, not action.

4. Informed Argument.

College writing always requires an argument. An argument requires a strong thesis statement. Check out our blog entry on writing strong thesis statements to learn how to focus your paper around a strong argument. College papers seek to prove something through a series of though-out examples and analyses. Professors are interested in seeing how you think, and whether your writing is thoughtful and considered. By examining the argument of your paper, and the ways that you back it up, professors are really looking to see the way your mind works in structuring and attacking a problem and arriving at a solution, via the written word.

3. Specifics.

When I first started writing college papers, they were often returned to me with “what does this mean?” or “can you give me specifics?” written in red ink on the margins. Soon, I learned that the more specific and to-the-point my language was, the higher I scored on my papers and the better my papers were. Being specific is important for many reasons, the most important of which is that specific language shows that you’re not BS’ing assignments, something your high school teachers might let you get away with. College professors want to see that you know exactly what you’re talking about. The operative word is ‘exact’. College professors want you to say what you mean, and they won’t tolerate any fluff.

2. Topicality.

College writing is centered around questions of interest to the academic community. In college writing, it’s very unlikely that you can get away with general and almost meaningless topics like “characterization” or “symbolism”. College professors want to see you really analyze the texts you read in a meaningful and scholarly way, and they respond well when you write on topics of academic interest. Instead of discussing the use of symbolism in The Inferno, which has already been written on extensively for going on five hundred years now, perhaps a more useful or interesting topic would be on the syntax of time and temporality within the text, for instance.  Or a comparison of The Inferno with a modern text that shows marked similarities and differences, and what that says about the text.

1. Expectations.

The crucial difference between high school and college writing is your professor’s expectations. College papers, simply put, are judged by a much higher standard than anything you’ve probably witnessed in high school. You will, therefore, need to try much harder in college. Often, humanities courses in college are judged on papers alone, so papers are worth far more in terms of your overall grade once you get to college. You will have to start papers earlier, think harder about what you’re going to say, do more research, and write better. You will not just be judged on the quality of your ideas alone, but also on your presentation of those ideas, so you will be expected to have impeccable grammar, spelling, and organization. It may sound difficult and overwhelming, but being forced to write in an academic environment is one of the best methods of not just teaching you how to write, but also of teaching you how to think. After four years of writing in a college environment, I feel that both my writing and my critical thinking has improved, though not without hard work and a lot of frustration. Luckily, it all pays off in the end.

Looking at a topic through a theoretical or philosophical lense can add a deeper level of understanding. Theory and philosophy are in practice everywhere, from politics to psychology to art to literature. Literary theory is something that every English major in college is expected to understand. Not only does theory add more layers of understanding to any literary work, but it also helps readers analyze works in deeper and more meaningful ways.

That said, college students often flagrantly name drop theorists like Deleuze, Baudrillard, Althusser, Derrida, et. al. without truly understanding a word of their theories. While taking higher level seminars in college, I often heard my fellow students talking about Lacan in ways that obviously showed they never really read Lacan beyond his Wikipedia page. While I don’t condone the irresponsible application of misunderstood theories to any of your critical papers, I do believe that a basic understanding of certain theories is highly useful for any person studying literature, not just because it will heighten your comprehension of literary works, but also because you will see firsthand the many ways that literature has power in the world beyond the physical pages of a book by applying theory into practice.

The purpose of this post is to hopefully inspire students to read literary theory outside of class. Not only will understanding theory make your reading more scholarly, more perceptive, and even more interesting, but it will also serve you well in writing papers. So here are 5 famous thinkers every student should know, and some links to their works.

5. Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure has had an enormous impact on liguistics and critical theory due to his writings on structural linguistics and semiotics. If you’ve ever heard people discussing the terms sign, signifier, and signified, they are referring to the school of structuralist thought founded by Saussure. Structuralists believed that language is the complicated workings of many structural parts, which can be individually dissected and analyzed in the search for meaning. Not only can language be intrepreted in this manner, but all of life itself can be seen as the complex workings of signals and signs. For more on structuralism, this resource is a great place to begin. For those who want to read Saussure, his Course in General Linguistics is the best place to begin.

4. Jacques Derrida. Derrida is a post-structuralist philosopher who became a prominent thinker due to his contribution to the field of deconstruction. From the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, deconstruction is: “A school of philosophy that originated in France in the late 1960s, has had an enormous impact on Anglo-American criticism. Largely the creation of its chief proponent Jacques Derrida, deconstruction upends the Western metaphysical tradition. It represents a complex response to a variety of theoretical and philosophical movements of the 20th century, most notably Husserlian phenomenology, Saussurean and French structuralism, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.” While Of Grammotology is perhaps not the easiest place to start reading Derrida, it’s considered by many to be his best known work.

3. Judith Butler. Judith Butler, a post-structuralist thinker, has greatly contributed to feminist theory and queer theory. This page from Theory.org is a great place to begin discovering Butler’s works. Butler has written that gender is a fluid concept that is not tied to a person’s sex, and “Butler argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause desire (towards the other gender). This is seen as a kind of continuum. Butler’s approach — inspired in part by Foucault — is basically to smash the supposed links between these, so that gender and desire are flexible, free-floating and not ’caused’ by other stable factors.” Understanding that the term “gender” is a myth is important for any kind of deeper analysis of works relevant to feminist studies or gender studies.

2. Edward Said. Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, is required in every post-colonial curriculum. Written in 1978, Said argued that the type of academic thinking prevalant during that time actually created more divide between the Western and non-Western worlds than any kind of greater understanding. “A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices… It is an erasure of the line between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other.’ Said argues for the use of “narrative” rather than “vision” in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient…” Readings of works by writers like Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Daniel Defoe, all of which are commonly read in high school and college courses, are of interest to post-colonial thinkers due to their imperialist undertones.

1. Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a psychoanalytical thinker who made great contributions to literary studies. His concept of ‘the other’ is often discussed in literary studies. “We depend on the existence of the Other to fill in the gap of our desires, to create, if only for a moment, the wholeness before our subjectivity, before there was an Other… Images constitute the self. Images of the literal Other create both a separation because it is through that difference that we are constituted but also as we look toward the Other, it is with the desire of being a unified self.” If you Google “Lacanian reading of” you find thousands of links to different writings that apply Lacan to everything from Langston Hughes to Wallace Stevens to Shakespeare. It makes sense: for every character, there is a foil, or an ‘other’. Because theory incorporates and attempts to explain the world around us, it of course has application to literature, which does the same except in a fictional setting.

Proofreading, like many things, has never been my strong suit. Over the years, however, I’ve picked up some tricks on how to proofread more effectively. By no means a professional editor, I still occasionally gloss over and miss errors in my writing from time to time. But the tricks I picked up really help me in my writing, whether in finding spelling errors that spellcheck doesn’t pick up (like quickly typing “by no means a professional dieter” instead of “by no means a professional editor”) or in correcting grammatical construction or in simply rephrasing sentences to make them sound better the second time around.

Hemingway once advised writers to write drunk and edit sober. While I don’t advise anyone to imbibe whilst writing (especially you underage students), I see some wisdom in that remark. Write with an open mind and a creative spirit, without too much thought to making things 100% perfect. Unplug yourself from doubt and fear and engage in some stream-of-consciousness freedom! That way, you stay as creative as possible. The real work comes afterwards, after you already have your thoughts on paper. Proofreading and editing is when you turn your thoughts in writing. Proofreading is that crucial step in transforming everything you’ve thought of and everything you’ve written down into something legible that makes it fun for readers to read.

Here are my 5 tips for proofreading most effectively.

5. Read your work aloud to yourself.

You use a different part of your brain when you read aloud, and it’s also a slower process that forces you to physically read one word at a time. Reading in your head is a patchy quick process, which often leads to skimming rather than true reading. If you have glossed over errors in your work while reading silently, reading aloud can be a sure way to catch those mistakes.

4. Try reading your document backwards.

This sounds strange, but many professional proofreaders swear by it, particularly to catch spelling mistakes. If you are writing a paper with many scientific or historical names, or if you are writing a paper for a foreign language class – situations where spellcheck is useless in catching errors – reading backwards is a good way to examine each word individually and out of context to make sure that basic structure is correct.

3. Track your changes.

Tracking changes is an intelligent way to edit while on a computer because it mimics what it’s like to edit in a hard copy where you can visibly see any cross-outs or notes you’ve written on the margins. This is a good way to compare documents while you are editing and making changes. By the way, Eduify lets you track changes, comments, versions.

2. Have someone else proofread for you.

This is a no brainer. If you’re truly serious about proofreading, getting help from peers is the best way to catch mistakes. Because they think differently than you do and because they aren’t as familiar with the topic are you are, a peer is a good way to gauge how your writing is interpreted by third party readers. (Hint: Eduify makes this part really easy – you can share with any of your contacts and facebook friends with ease).

1. Always double check.

Always double check one last time before you turn in. It’s better to be safe than sorry!