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CABRINI'S CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE WRITING [Focus | Conventions | Content | Organization | Style | Definitions] This characteristic of effective writing refers to the degree to which a paper establishes a clear purpose that unifies its own content. A focused text addresses the specific task expectations defined by the writing situation while constructing an individualized and sustained purpose. A writer's purpose establishes a clear and relevant relationship between each point in the text that moves beyond a mere listing of facts about the topic. When a paper has a tight focus, it allows the reader to clearly see not only what your subject matter is, but also what your purpose is in writing about it. Ideally, you will write in order to convey a specific insight into your topic, one that will either excite or challenge the reader. If this purpose lacks clarity, your paper may seem like a random collection of facts without any particular point, leaving the reader, at best, uninterested and, at worst, wondering, "So what? What is your point?" For the purposes of Cabrini College's Writing Competency, Focus will refer to:
Most writing situations that are not personal come with predetermined task expectations defined by your primary audience: your instructor, editor, or employer. These expectations might include the following:
Thus, if your professor assigns a research-based letter to your local Senator in which you are supposed to take a moral stand on the use of prenatal genetic testing and you write a personal narrative to no one in particular about how your mother wished you had been born with blonde hair, your paper will not demonstrate an awareness of the task and seem unfocused as a result. To avoid this problem, if you have a written assignment or task description, underline and then check off each expectation to make sure you complete your task. Beyond meeting the task expectations, though, lies an even more intricate issue: creating a clear purpose that allows you to unify your information and ideas so that your specific point about your topic is clear. Many writers find this challenge the most intimidating part of writing because it requires them to look at the same task expectations given to their peers and then create their own unique point of view about the assigned topic. It requires that you know what you want your readers to know/believe/feel about your topic --and then find a way to announce this purpose and continuously refer back to this purpose throughout the text. An unfocused paper only offers a series of facts or observations without attempting to relate them to a central issue, purpose, or insight. A focused paper will merely provide this framework for the readers to follow. A compelling focus will provide a purpose that moves beyond the obvious or safe purpose by offering a unique insight into the topic that will challenge the reader's intellect and expectations. Example: Read the assignment, rough draft, and revised draft by Matt Watson in The Bedford Handbook, pages 62-71. Notice that the assignment asks the writer to alert general readers to a significant problem facing today's college students. The primary expectations are that the essay use personal experience, observations, interviews, and source material as evidence. As an academic essay, the writer should know that the problem he is addressing should be identified in a thesis statement early in the essay (62). Watson's rough draft includes a decent opening paragraph that offers several relevant observations, but the actual insight is very vague: " They seem to be trying to hook us on their cards; unfortunately m any of us do get hooked on a cycle of spending that leads to financial ruin." By making his thesis statement so vague, the paper becomes unfocused: we know that he wants to talk about the way credit cards manipulate college students into spending over their limits, but we do not know how the credit cards companies manipulate college students. Her revised thesis statement, though, offers a much clearer and more compelling focus: "By granting college students liberal lending arrangements, credit card companies often hook them on a cycle of spending that can ultimately lead to financial ruin." This sentences alerts us not only to the specific problem which college students face but to the way this happens too. For further information and examples regarding focus, see the following sections in The Bedford Handbook:
Conventions [top] This characteristic of effective writing refers to the agreement (stated or unstated) between writers and their intended audiences to follow particular practices, procedures, or techniques. When the practices, procedures, and techniques employed by the writer are those that the audience expects, the author's text is said to be conventional. Notice that this definition of conventions allows for the situated nature of writing practices, procedures, and techniques. Whatever conventions you--as writer--and your audience agree to in one situation are not necessarily the conventions you and another audience will agree to in some other situation. Still, some set of conventions will always be used in every writing situation; if it was not, the audience would be either inefficient at processing or unable to process the writer's meaning. For the purposes of Cabrini College's Writing Competency, Conventions will refer to:
Many, if not all, of these elements of conventions refer to skills you may associate with proofreading. Certainly, as you proofread your paper for the final time (not to be confused with re-thinking your paper) you should pay close attention to the paper's conventions. Of course, if you do not know where/when/why a comma belongs in a sentence, then you must learn this. It will take time to do this, but eventually--much faster than you think--you will internalize some of these standard conventions so that you barely have to consciously think about them anymore.
While thinking about conventions in terms of proofreading is certainly important, it does not capture the significance of writing an essay that is careless with its conventions. This statement does: Form eclipses content almost every time. This means that you could write an essay in which you propose one of the most original and significant ideas of the twentieth century, but if you fail to spell words correctly or write coherent sentences, you will not be taken seriously. Example: Look at the rough draft of the paragraph on pg. 57-58 of The Bedford Handbook. Were this paragraph submitted as part of a final draft, the first and next-to-last sentences would tell her audience that she had little interest in this assignment or its outcome. She should expect her audience to reciprocate in kind. The first sentence neglects to include a comma after the transitional element which opens the sentence. The next-to-last sentence ends with a question even though it is not a question. Read through the letter at the top of pg. 56 and find other examples where the author indicates to the reader that she could care less what the reader's response is to her writing. A mastery of conventions will not win you any extra points with friends or employers, but it will give your friends and employers every opportunity to focus on what you are saying and not on how you are saying it. See The Bedford Handbook for further information and examples regarding Conventions:
Content [top] This characteristic of effective writing refers to the ways in which a paper is made functional. Writing is a communicative act, and the content is the substance of this communication (not how it is communicated). The descriptions, arguments, evidence, details, and analysis that comprise the content are what make a writer's thesis and proposition tenable or untenable to the reader. Your content is the experience itself in the personal experience essay. It is the definition or the comparison and contrast itself in the expository essay. It is the evidence itself in the argumentative essay. Since content seems so basic, naïve writers will assume that all content is equally good, but it is not. Sometimes, for instance, you need more or fewer examples to support the point you are making. Sometimes, you presume--having a comprehensive picture of the content in your mind--that a reader can climb inside your mind and access this content. Since this is impossible, you must provide your reader sufficient detail and explanation so that s/he can understand the point you are trying to make. For the purposes of Cabrini College's Writing Competency, Content will refer to:
Most of these elements of content will be associated with that part of the paper you consider the most important: the "meat" of the paper, what the paper is about, the paper's argument. To produce effective content, you must read your essay through the reader's eyes. You--as writer--would only have to produce a few code-words in your text to remind you what your experience was, ideas are, or argument intends to be. But your audience must have these experiences, ideas, and arguments fully articulated and explained; otherwise, you are begging your reader to fill in the gaps you have left in your essay with interpretations of what you meant to say. These interpretations may or may not be appropriate for the content you were trying to convey. Example: Look at the sample argument on pg. 503 of The Bedford Handbook. In the first full paragraph on pg. 3 of the essay, the writer indicates to his audience that the costs of not educating illegal immigrants are obvious. This may be true, but how is the audience supposed to know what the author bases his commonsense on--personal experience? source material? a dream? In the absence of content, audiences will either make it up or lose interest altogether. Read through the rest of the sample argument. Where else does the writer fail to include relevant content? Where do you--as audience--feel yourself getting lost or having to make up content? Being a writer is a powerful position to be in. You get to control what counts; you get to control the content (that is, the substance) of the communicative act. But when you fail to lead your audience through your content, your power as a writer is undermined and/or taken from you altogether. See The Bedford Handbook for further information and examples regarding Content:
Organization [top] This characteristic of effective writing refers to the ways writing achieves coherent unity or serves as a functional whole. In particular, it refers to the cumulative nature of the essay, the functionality of topic sentences in paragraphs, and the use of transitional elements throughout the essay. Your paper's organization occurs on a macro and a micro level. On the macro-level, your paper is organized by, first, your focus. Do you know what you want to write about? If so, your organization should be self-evident. If you don't know what you actually want to say, then your paper will circle around itself until you have met the assignment's page requirements. But knowing what you want to say isn't enough; you also have to show your reader how your ideas are organized. This requires that you explicitly show your reader how all of the parts are connected to form a whole. This is as important on the micro-level as it is on the macro-level. On the micro-level, your reader needs to see how each paragraph develops the larger focus, as well as how individual sentences are related to each other. For the purposes of Cabrini College's Writing Competency, Organization will refer to:
To write a paper that is effectively organized on the macro-level, you must use outlines. You can produce these outlines before or after you write your essay, but an outline is necessary. The outline shows you how the parts are--or are not--connected to the paper's larger focus. Can you determine how to identify individual paragraphs on your outline? If you cannot, then you probably have not developed a paragraph that serves as a functional piece of the larger whole that is your focus. Similarly, if you cannot represent the connection between the points of your argument in your outline, then you have yet to develop a functional organizational strategy. Example: Look at the sample APA paper on pg. 717 of The Bedford Handbook. What is the focus of this essay? (Hint: It is at the end of the first paragraph.) In this essay, the author uses section headings to guide the reader through the essay's development of this focus. This is an explicit way to help your reader. If you have never tried incorporating section headings into your text sometime, then why not try it on the next paper? Provide an outline for the entire essay. Use this format: A), I), a), and i)--if necessary. Let A) represent the main points of this focus (there will be an A), B), C), and D)). Let I), II), etc. represent the ways in which each point is developed. Use the other section divisions as necessary. Writers typically assume that their organization is fine. They assume this because they see their text through their own eyes instead of through the reader's eyes. Learn to anticipate how your audience will likely read your writing. See The Bedford Handbook for further information and examples regarding Organization:
Style [top] This characteristic of effective writing refers to the strategic ways in which a writer recognizes and responds to audience expectations, writing traditions, and his or her own individual voice. It is the process through which a writer translates his or her passion for words and ideas into a form that a reader can understand. When you use style effectively, your paper will read as if it is uniquely your own (in contrast to the majority of papers which will read as if anyone or any machine could have written the text). In other words, it will sound authentic. This does not mean that you will fail to follow conventions, but it does indicate that conventions are not all-encompassing. Conventions can be rigorously observed through a wide range of punctuation choices, word choices, points-of-view, tones, and constructions of sentences. For the purposes of Cabrini College's Writing Competency, Style will refer to:
Many beginning writers associate the elements of style with artificiality and being fake. They assume that style centers on learning the appropriate jargon. Although it can be hegemonic in just this way, that need not be all that style is. Listen to yourself talk sometime. Listen to your ideas as they develop in your mind. This is your voice. Turn this voice into text--observing all the relevant conventions--and you will have made great strides in writing with style. Next, think about how your words and sentences are going to impact your audience. When you can be deliberate about the words you choose and the way you construct your sentences, again, you will have made great strides in writing with style. Example: Consider the styles of these two opening paragraphs in an essay about Hamlet:
In the first example, the student obviously has an idea about how an analytic essay is supposed to sound. Unfortunately, she has nothing to say of substance (see Focus), and therefore, she has no impetus to make her writing interesting from the reader's perspective. In the second example, however, she is obviously more energized by her thesis, and her style reflects this enthusiasm. A reader is pulled into the text, for example, by her decision to open with three short, shocking sentences which she complicates in the following sentences by showing the reader that there is more to Claudius than his actions indicate. Read the essay in The Bedford Handbook that begins on page 674. Identify passages where the writing is boring. How would you re-write this passage to make it more interesting for you, the reader? For the past twelve years of your formal education, people have been beating the style out of you. The hope was that you would become a sort of machine, capable of producing unoriginal, uninteresting, and non-threatening documents. Enough of that. Be original. Be interesting. Shake somebody up with your writing. See The Bedford Handbook for further information and examples concerning Style:
Some Definitions [top] The Bedford Handbook: The required writing handbook which all Cabrini students should own and use as they write their academic papers. Characteristics of Effective Writing: Qualities exhibited by a piece of writing that allow it to convey its specific purpose to the reader clearly. Hegemony: The predominant or most influential state of opinions; the prevailing view (esp. cultural view). Jargon: Specific vocabulary associated with a specific area of specialization that demonstrates membership in a profession or group, like computer jargon ("IMAP Server"), medical jargon (think of any "code blue" on ER and the phrases they use), etc. Proofreading: A methodical search in the final draft of the paper for misspellings, typographical mistakes, and omitted words. Recursive: The act of moving back and forth in a sequence. Re-thinking: The first step of a multi-step process in which writers consider and re-work their paper's focus, organization, and content. Situated: Placed under particular writing circumstances (e.g. writing a letter to a friend as opposed to a memo to a boss). Writing Competency: A level of writing assessed according to a specific set of criteria. Writing Situation: The specific expectations about a writing task that define format, style, level of formality, evidence, etc. [top] Site Home Page: http://www.cabrini.edu/writing All Rights Reserved, but see our fair use policy. |