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Using the Writer's Style Guide
The Writer's Style Guide will help you to format your writing,
follow some style rules ("conventions"), and document any sources
that you should acknowledge. For a start, quickly read the entire guide.
After that, refer to it when you have a question. With the help of this
guide, you will be able to focus on what really matters—the content
of your writing.
Planning Your Piece of
Writing
Your course will provide directions about your writing task, but the
steps of choosing a thesis and preparing an outline are basic for many
kinds of writing.
Choosing a Thesis
The thesis is the point that you want to examine or defend. It is
something that you then set out to prove. It is important for you to be
clear in your own mind about what you are trying to prove—before
you begin writing.
Suppose you have been given the essay topic "Compare and contrast
madness in Hamlet and Death of a Salesman." There are
famous mad scenes in Hamlet, and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman
has delusions and eventually takes his own life. As a first step to
composing that essay, you would read the two plays, paying close attention
to the scenes that are relevant to the topic. You might then decide, for
example, that Hamlet was pretending to have lost his sanity but that Willy
Loman really was not sane. This would be your thesis.
Once you have a thesis, you can begin gathering evidence. A major mistake
that some students make is to decide on a thesis before reading the work
in depth: they pick a topic on which they have strong opinions, and they
set out to prove what they have already decided. They then fail to find
and recognize important evidence. The result is a mediocre piece of writing.
Preparing an Outline
There are several ways to go about the process of prewriting, drafting,
revising, and editing, but many students find that developing an outline
is a useful step. To begin developing an outline, list all the points
you can think of in favour of your thesis. Then pick out the ones that
seem strongest. Arrange these points in a meaningful order. You might
save your best argument until the end or proceed from general to specific
or use another logical sequence. When you have done this, you have made
an outline.
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