Category Archives: First draft

Purposeful pauses in writing

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, Cognitive process and writing, Deadlines, First draft, Posts by Nancy, Procrastination, Productivity, Writing process

By Nancy Ami

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
– Douglas Adams

Nancy procrastinating with Lucy

A younger me learned to love deadlines, too, but for a different reason. A deadline was the only thing, I mean the only thing, that could force me to draft a piece of writing.

As a top-notch procrastinator who submitted assignments just in time for deadlines, I wondered why I struggled so much to get my thoughts down on a page. Why was drafting so hard? The “linear” process of writing: choosing a topic, generating ideas, planning, drafting, revising and editing – seemed easy enough.  What was it about the drafting – the movement of fingers across keys, translating ideas into text – that made it so painful?

Almost 25 years ago, I attended the 1993 ATESL (Alberta Teachers of English as a Second Language) Conference, eager to learn how I might teach writing better (and how I might write better myself). I attended Ernie Hall’s excellent presentation. He explained the cognitive processes writers engage in. He described the heavy demand these processes place on writers and that these contributed to writers’ frequent pausing.  He outlined the following intricate purposes for which writers pause as they draft: search, plan, evaluate, describe, question, and revise.

  • Search

We search for new ideas and the words to express them.

  • Plan

While we plan before we write, we also plan as we write. We consider order and arrangement of ideas. We plan our next steps as we draft, for in drafting, we gain insight into order and idea development.

  • Evaluate

We pause to judge as we draft. We wonder if it’s good enough. We critically analyze what is on the page before moving on. As a result of a pause to evaluate, we work back through our draft, revising and rewriting what we have already drafted.

  • Question (wonder)

We pause to wonder as we draft. We ask ourselves questions as we write. “How do I know that?” or “Where did I read that?” or “What else do I know?”

  • Revise

We pause to fix. We fix content, organization, word choices, sentence structure, grammar, and spelling. We revise so much that we forget to draft.

  • Decide (proceed without solution)

We pause but decide to proceed, to move on, to continue drafting. We may worry that we might forget the reason we paused. We capture the essence of our struggle, perhaps via track changes: “Add a citation here” or “Find more data for this argument” or we open an additional word document to note issues we face as we draft. We keep drafting, though, trusting a solution to the problem will emerge as we go.

Writers employ strategic pauses, meaningful pauses, necessary pauses when drafting. Writers pause for a reason.  I had always thought that my pauses meant there was something wrong; that I couldn’t write; that I had nothing worthy to say. Now I understand the cognitive processes drafting involves. When drafting, I pause and analyze my pause. I strategically search, plan, evaluate, question, revise, or proceed without solution. Drafting is hard work because it involves constant, relentless monitoring and management.

I still love and need deadlines to get started on my drafts.  However, understanding drafting’s complexity and the intricate decision-making it involves helps me embrace the process, capturing my ideas into text just before the deadlines whoosh by.

As the Manager of the Centre for Academic Communication, Nancy loves working with her CAC team to support UVic writers, collaborating with UVic partners and faculty. As an EAL Specialist, she’s taught international students for 25 years, in both public and private institutions.

 

Smudging the lines of the outline

Academic Writing, Centre for Academic Communication, First draft, Outlines, Posts by Kaveh, Road map, Writing process

Madeline Walker’s post, Writing undressed, made me think about my process of planning for academic writing and my beliefs about it. It also reminded me of a conversation we had a few months ago about the value of making an outline before starting to write.

I am all about planning. Before writing a paper, journal article, or a thesis chapter, I always spend a long time mind mapping and creating an outline. I try to make sure I know what my thesis statement is and how many sub-points I need to support that thesis. I organize all my ideas and try to imagine the line of argument as specifically as possible. Then I order the ideas on an outline and try to make it so detailed that I end up with topic sentences for each paragraph, basically creating a template for my paper that I will fill in later with supporting sentences for each paragraph.

My conversation with Madeline was on the effectiveness of this approach. She raised a question about the possibility of having such a detailed outline before writing, whether we really can know exactly what we want to say before we start to write, and I defended the idea of preparing before writing, that the argument can get off track and confusing unless we have such a specific outline before we start.

Kaveh Tagharobi is a graduate student and an EAL specialist at the CAC

Reading her blog post about the stages of undress, however, I now see what she meant that day. Those stages of disarray that Writing undressed talks about are so familiar for me as well. With all my mind maps and topic sentence outlines, I constantly find myself reorganizing, merging and adding paragraphs, and even changing direction altogether. My apparently carefully dressed outline gets disrobed during the writing process, as I discover that two of my main ideas are actually the same and need to be merged, or that I need one more paragraph to discuss this or that topic.

But does this mean that I give up on my outlines? Probably not. I still see the value in having the road map outlined before I embark on writing, even if I have to accept that this is only tentative. I believe I can at least draw a sketch of my outline and then be prepared to smudge the lines as I write. The number of modifications and alterations probably depends on the complexity of that particular piece of writing I am working on. I think I can make my outline with more certainty when I am writing a five paragraph essay for a first-year English course, and I probably should expect more changes when I am writing the first draft of my thesis.

I still think that I would be too lost if I start writing without an outline, but after reading Madeline’s post, now I feel much more comfortable when I adjust the outline as I write. The outline is the suit that I thought I’d wear to the party, dry-cleaned and carefully laid down on the bed, but my room is a mess with all my wardrobe out and I am trying them all on and throwing them around before I am happy with the look I want to leave the house with…or to submit my manuscript!

Kaveh Tagharobi is an EAL (English as an additional language) Specialist at the Centre for Academic Communication.  He is also in the English Department’s MA Program with a concentration in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought.