Thoughts on Drafting

How I Think the "Student's Guide" Reading on Drafting Affected My Drafting Process

In this post, I reflect on the reading from the "Student's Guide to First Year Writing" on the topic of drafting and organizing one's piece, as I now have the experience of writing my own Quick Reference Guide and thus am prepared to analyze what advice I used, or didn't use, in my writing process.

Unknown, "Man Sitting At Drafting Board" circa 1936 via commons.wikimedia.org.
Public Domain.

I think that, looking back after writing my own Quick Reference Guide, the "Student's Guide's" information and recommendations on writing introductions and conclusions is important. My main reason for saying this is that, regardless of what type of writing you're working with, I believe you cannot have an effective work that does not have some identifiable introduction and conclusion. No piece of writing can simply omit a beginning and an end and be intact. I felt this importance as I was writing my QRG; I arguably struggled the most at the beginning and end of the guide because I felt like that was where I had to establish, and re-establish, what my guide was about in a way that wasn't strictly informative, and rather was a blend between informational and just plain intriguing. This quality of introductions and conclusions - the appealing concision accompanied by meaningful construction - made these parts difficult because I had to approach them differently from the body of my guide which only required me to maintain an account of the controversy and its happenings, groups involved, and sources reporting on the matter. The "Student's Guide" had advice that I used for both the introduction and conclusion of my piece. For my introduction, I focused primarily on what the reading said about direction; I ensured that my introduction gave my reader a sense of direction before the body of the text began, and I think this functioned well in my piece. And as for my conclusion, I think the reading had an abundance of excellent advice for crafting a smooth finish to one's piece. In the reading, it was highly recommended that you, as the writer, answer the ever-persistent "so what?" question, which can be done through a painting a picture. I did exactly that, as I had my final paragraphs dedicated to providing a sense of a grander picture that the controversy rested at the center of, which I believe assigned a great amount of meaning to my topic and my guide about it.

In addition, I think the reading made good points about organizing information and creating structured paragraphs. In all, I think having a mind on my guide's organization was essential to my writing process, as I actually began my QRG with the formatting and organization of subheadings to plan out how my guide would read, from which point I then just set about filling in the blanks. And when it came to constructing paragraphs, I think the Point-Information-Explanation archetype did a fair, but not great job, in most cases encountered in my guide. While I think in some instances it was best to link ideas through information to then portray a point, I do think that explanation is key in any paragraph, as it is extremely relevant to the QRG's purpose of informing and explaining a topic in depth.

I did not think that the reading's various points about thesis statements proved useful in my drafting process. While this may not have been the case for others who wrote QRGs, for me the QRG was about telling a story in a way that emphasized logic, information, and fair analysis, and I did not think that a thesis statement fit well with that objective. In my experience with thesis statements, theses are arguments to be made in your writing that you declare like an abstract in a science paper, and I found myself, as I wrote my QRG, actively avoiding trying to craft a specific argument, as I think that would obstruct the purpose of displaying all the sides of the controversy that my QRG was about. In other words, I do not think it is the writer's place in the QRG genre to make a thesis statement, or argument, as it betrays the point of the QRG. The writer's duty in this genre is to present the facts and inform, a purpose which I believe can be made clear in an introduction. I suppose the only element of the reading's advice that I think applies would be to have a clear sense of direction be established early in your piece, which is an element that was also included in the reading's recommendations for the composition of an effective introduction.

Reflection

I found numerous differences in my thoughts on the reading on drafting from those of Savannah and Isabel. Primarily, I found that my classmates valued using theses in QRGs, at least to some extent. In my response I thought that an argument, or thesis, had no place in QRG, but my classmates seemed to suggest that in some way the thesis can still be applied in order to give the writing an explicit direction. Additionally, my classmates held similar views to me in that they believed introductions and conclusions were very important in the genre to begin and end the piece effectively.

I think that the three areas I need to focus on in my QRG are:

1. An introduction that is succinct, but also conveys enough information on my controversy to attract the reader.

2. In some sense, a thesis in that introduction that provides a clear sense of direction to the piece so that the reader will know how I will construct the organization of my QRG, to ensure that the way I inform on the controversy is logical and understandable.

3. A conclusion that ends the QRG efficiently but also successfully alludes to a larger picture in a way that does not lose the reader, as I think it's vital I do so because my controversy alone may seem esoteric and need to fit into a larger, more meaningful picture for the reader.