Chapter 14

Chapter 14 is on drafting. It’s an effective strategy to work from an outline when you start drafting, though it’s important to consider your outline as a guide rather than a hard and fast blueprint.

The building blocks of your draft are your paragraphs, so you want them all to be effective. It’s important to focus each paragraph on a specific idea or concept. Paragraphs should be organized according to some consistent rationale; chronology, cause and effect, process explanation, and compare/contrast are all possible ways to set up and organize your paragraphs.

When drafting, it’s important to keep your reader’s attention and to use your sources correctly. To this end, always seek to use as much detail as possible, though all the details you present should be relevant. The information from your sources should be well-integrated into your own prose and argument, but also clearly cited and delineated. Keeping your reader’s attention and comprehension can also depend on consistent and effective transitions, and the chapter provides examples of some of these.

The next section of the chapter goes into strategies for constructing an effective introduction in particular. There are a variety of ways to construct an interesting and effective introduction, and you’ll want to select one of the ones the book describes based on your own writing situation, subject, goals, and target audience. The chapter also provides advice for structuring your paper to be easily followed, and closes with a section on conclusions with similar advice to the section on introductions. What stands out as ideas to keep in mind for writing a conclusion: you’ll almost certainly want to link back to your introduction, and your link should use a technique that complements the ones you used in the intro. Further, a conclusion ought to offer something like extra analysis, speculation, a question, or a call to action depending on your writing circumstances, your goal, your subject, and your intended audience.

It sounds repetitive, but then again repetition is one of the best ways to really get ideas through to people.