Writing well requires following certain steps in sequence:
- Narrowing your topic
- Organizing your information, including writing an overarching topic sentence or thesis and subtopic sentences or plot lines
- Writing a first draft
- Revising, revising, revising
- Editing
Once your first draft is complete, revising becomes most important. So many tasks comprise revising—checking for complete sentences, tightening wordiness, analyzing ideas for logic, honing vocabulary, fixing grammar errors, adding figures of speech and style. Students wonder where to begin.
Begin with coherence, the most important element of writing. Coherence means making sure all your sentences make sense and flow from one to another. Coherence means making sure your readers understand what you mean—easily, at first read, without an interpreter.
How do you do that? Some ways include:
- Make sure every sentence in the body paragraphs supports the thesis. If you use an anecdote, make sure it is an example of the ideas in the thesis. If you use a simile or metaphor, make sure it fits with the topic. If the topic is igneous rock, for example, the simile “as hot as the steam from a steam boat” is off topic, whereas “as hot as a lava lake” is on topic.
- If you use numbers (three kinds of rocks, five members of my family, one favorite memory), check that you have named all the numbers and no more.
- Use logical transitions. “Because” means something causes something else. Make sure you have named a cause and an effect if you use “because.” “Finally” means the last one in a series or the last point. If you have only two or three points, you shouldn’t use “finally.” You should use “secondly,” or “next,” or “third.”
- If you use a pronoun, make sure you have named the noun the pronoun refers back to. And make sure you have named that noun before you use the pronoun (not “When she fell, Mary broke her arm,” but “When Mary fell, she broke her arm.” If you use “this,” make sure your reader can know in a word or phrase what “this” refers to. If “this” is vague or complicated, add a noun after “this” (this situation, this erosion, this loss of interest). If you have two women talking, make sure if you use “she,” the reader knows which one you are referring to. Otherwise, use her name or title or position.
- Check that your sentences are complete thoughts–not fragments or run-ons. Make sure your complex sentences contain no more than two dependent clauses so readers needn’t hold multiple ideas in their minds at once. Check that your sentences vary in length, with most more than ten and fewer than 20 words.
- Change your weak, vapid verbs to active, dynamic verbs. Eliminate the verb “to be” and passive voice verbs.
If what you write lacks coherence, no matter how specific the vocabulary, no matter how beautiful the description, no matter how lofty your aim, your writing will flop. Your writing must make sense to a reader without you standing at her elbow explaining, “Well, what I mean is. . .”
English Writing Teacher 