Block 1. The Writing Process

Theme: “Making a Plan. Drafts and Revisions”

• Making a Plan

You've chosen a subject (or had one chosen for you), explored it, thought about the topics you discovered, gathered information about them. Now what? Are you ready to begin writing?

Well, yes. But first you need a plan. Perhaps nothing more than a loose sense of purpose, held in your mind and never written down – what jazz musicians call a head arrangement. Head arrangements can work very well – if you have the right kind of head and if you’re thoroughly familiar with the subject.

But sometimes all of us (and most times most of us) require a more tangible plan. One kind is a statement of purpose; another is a preliminary, scratch outline.

The Statement of Purpose

It's nothing complicated – a paragraph or two broadly describing what you want to say, how you're going to organize it, what you want readers to understand, feel, believe. The paragraphs are written for yourself, to clarify your ideas and to give you a guide; you don’t have to worry about anyone else's reading them. Even so, you may find on occasion that composing a statement of purpose is difficult, perhaps impossible. What that means is that you don’t really know what your purpose is. Yet even failure is worthwhile if it makes you confront and answer the question: Just what am I aiming at in this paper?

Not facing that question before they begin to write is one of the chief causes people suffer from writing block. It’s not so much that they can't think of what to say, as that they haven’t thought about what they can say. Ideas do not come out of the blue; as we saw in the last chapter, they have to be sought. And when they are found, they don’t arrange themselves. A writer has to think about the why and how of using them.

Many of us think better if we write down our ideas. That’s all a statement of purpose is really, thinking out loud, except with a pencil. The thinking, however, is not so much about the subject itself as about the problems of focusing and communicating it.

Here’s how a statement of purpose might look for a theme about attitudes toward physical relations, love, and marriage in the 1990s:

It seems to me that today people in their twenties feel differently about physical relations, love, and marriage than young people did in the 1960s. I’m not claiming the differences are universal, that every young adult today feels one way, while every young adult twenty years ago felt another. Just that the predominant tone has changed. I want to identify and describe these differences, focusing on the nineties, and to discuss why the changes came about. I see a problem of organization. Am I going to organize primarily around the differences themselves, first attitudes toward physical relations, then attitudes towards love and marriage? In this case, a discussion of causes would be subordinate. On the other hand, I could make the causes my main points of organization, beginning with a relatively detailed discussion of how attitudes today are different, but spending most of the paper in discussing how feminism, the hardening economy, and a tougher, more self-centered approach to life have combined to bring about the changes. I think I'll do it this second way. What I want readers to see is less of the facts about the new attitudes to-ward physical relations, love, and marriage, and more of the social and cultural causes generating the change.

The Scratch Outline

An outline is a way of dividing a subject into its major parts, of dividing these in turn into subparts, and so on, into finer and finer detail. There are formal outlines, which are usually turned in with a composition and even serve as compositions in their own right. And there are informal outlines, often called “working” or “scratch” outlines. The formal variety follows rules that prescribe the alternating use of numbers and letters and the way in which the analysis must proceed. But formal outlines and their rules will not concern us here.

Our interest is in the scratch outline, which serves only the writer’s use and may be cast in any form that works. Begin by asking: What are the major sections of my composition?

For example:

I. Beginning

II. How attitudes toward sex, love, and marriage in the 1990s differ from those in the 1960s

III. Why the differences occurred

IV. Closing

Now apply a similar question to each major section:

I. Beginning

A. Identify subject and establish focus—on the reasons for the change rather than on the change itself

B. Quality and limit: attitudes in question are the predominating ones, those which set the tone of a generation

II. How attitudes toward physical relations, love, and marriage differ in the 1990s from those in the 1960s

A. Physical relations – less permissive, less promiscuous

B. Love – cooler, not so completely a preemptive good C. Marriage – more calculating, rational; avoid early marriage, first get career on track

III. Why the differences occurred

A. Feminism – more job opportunities for women and greater independence; also stronger sense of their own worth – all this weakens the allure of love and marriage

B. Tighter economy – future has to be planned more carefully, less room for romantic illusions

C. More self-centered view of life – partly a result of the two conditions above, but becomes a cause in its own right

IV. Closing

A. The attitudes of the nineties more realistic, less prone to disillusion

B. But perhaps idealism has been sacrificed, or weakened, and the prevailing materialism is too ready to sell the world short

Thus the analysis could go on: the A’s and B’s broken down, examples introduced, comparisons offered, and so on. Generally, it is better to proceed with the analysis one step at a time, as in the example above. This keeps the whole subject better in mind and is more likely to preserve a reasonable balance. If you exhaustively analyze category I before moving on to II, then carry II down to fine detail before tackling III, you may lose sight of the overall structure of the composition.

How far you take a scratch outline depends on the length of your composition and obviously on your willingness to spend time in planning. But the more planning you do, the easier the actual writing will be. A good scratch outline suggests where possible paragraph breaks might come, and the ideas you have jotted down in the headings are the germs of topic statements and supporting sentences.

But however you proceed and however far you carry the scratch outline, remember that as a plan it is only tentative, subject to change. And the odds are that you will change it. No matter how much you think about a subject or how thoroughly you plan, the actuality of writing opens up unforeseen possibilities and reveals the weakness of points that seemed important. A scratch outline is a guide, but a guide you should never hesitate to change.