sevenhelz

when I'm blogging, I tend to just open up dreamwidth and pour out whatever words are in my head. I'll edit slightly as I go along, but it's basically stream-of-consciousness - I'm lucky it mostly makes sense, honestly!
Lately this hasn't seemed like enough, and I've not been terribly happy with my writing. This is because I know I'm capable of better, when I actually plan things. The only example of this I can think of is what I intended to do with the "morality of joining the forces" post - had I worked through the links I gave and summarised them, before putting down the points I'd been jotting in a notebook for a couple of weeks, I'd have the post I wanted and that I felt the topic deserves (in a state-the-problem-before-you-discuss-it kind of way, like you might discuss the definition of a contentious term before applying it to your subject material). On the other hand, writing is not my livelihood, nor does staring at a computer screen keep me fit and healthy. I'm not going to kick myself for not being "better". What I do want to do is explain how I think I can do that.


When I was writing essays for Uni, I did ridiculous amounts of research. I love indexes in books; I would happily index anything I though vaguely relevant to my topic, photocopy the appropriate pages, go through highlighting and saving good quotes - temporarily taking a lot of information that way, although I don't retain it for more than about a week - and either confirming some conclusion I'd already made or coming up with lots of good questions to ask, to be able to play devil's advocate about a topic. This stage was tremendously important to me academically, because there is absolutely nothing new under the sun, and not only did I not want to be accused of plagiarism, I find that reading other's opinions helps me affirm my own - even if they are quite different.
Obviously blogging tends to be about personal issues but I think some of the same principles apply. Not doing the thorough research of previously-made points changes the writing a bit, though.

So. Take all of your quotes &/or Important Points. Decide if any of them go together, and if they do, which is the Important Point and which is the supplemental/quote. If two quotes conflict you may want to put them close together and write Important Points to match them. All your quotes and Important Points need to go in some kind of sensible order; as I mentioned before, discussing the definition of a term should usually come early in your writing; quotes or points which lead naturally to some kind of decision or conclusion should probably be later. Don't worry about introductions or conclusions just yet though!

The next step is to turn every quote &/or Important Point into a paragraph. The ideal structure of a paragraph is PEE, Point Example Explanation. Of course many paragraphs end up being more complicated than that, but for instance, if you're trying to fit two or three quotes into the same paragraph, you're not really writing - you might as well just link (or reference).

You'll probably change your mind about the order of your paragraphs as you go into more detail. That's okay. It's your work - put in whatever you like. Also, if it's an academic piece, at some point you should get someone to proof-read it. The longer it is the more important this is, as you will know from how tired you are, and how bored you are by the topic! Fresh eyes will notice not only typos but also if there's something you think you've made clear that actually requires some background knowledge, or if you've moved a paragraph to before its explanation. Fun things like that that are easily corrected.

And last of all... write a conclusion. You've had time to digest it all now. Write an informed conclusion, and then write an introduction explaining what you're going to explore through your writing. It's not cheating, everyone does it.

ironically I did not apply the above method to this post.