Composing Strategies
By Alice L. Trupe

The drafting phase of the writing process begins when actual text is created. Most students will benefit from writing multiple drafts of a text. However, the number of drafts written should depend on circumstances and should be open to individual variation and choice, because there are legitimate differences among writers. Teaching opportunities in the drafting phase are abundant when students use class time for drafting. Students may need strategies for getting past writer's block, and usually need progressive instruction from the elementary through the college level in writing from sources.

When you plan writing instruction, plan flexibly to accommodate individual differences in writing style and differences in the writing task. It is useful for students to learn to take time and care with their writing, to learn how to re-see their texts, to expand them, rearrange them, delete irrelevancies, change the tone and style, and so forth. But when every writing task requires, say, three drafts with peer feedback, the idea of process is distorted into mechanical routine followed only to meet classroom requirements, and it loses its usefulness for students. Instruction that acknowledges different individual styles of drafting is more meaningful for budding writers.

Some writers write quickly and some slowly. Those who write quickly may simply generate ideas by putting them on the screen or on paper; they develop their thinking about the subject by writing. These writers may find it easier to discard or change text, either as they draft at the computer screen or in successive revisions. When you watch them at work in a computer lab, you'll see them keyboard quickly, often using the backspace-delete key just as quickly as other keys, deleting large portions as they go along. A first draft by such a writer will probably need a fair amount of revising. Other writers who draft quickly may do a lot of thinking about their text before beginning. Such writers try out phrases, sentences, and plans "in their heads" before sitting down at the keyboard or with a pen. These writers may be genuine last-minute writers, whose texts don't emerge at all until right before a deadline. They tell you, "I work best under pressure," and the results, that is, the quality of the first draft, seems to confirm their belief. The reason is that they've done much of their drafting and discarding mentally before actually drafting.

Some writers who produce text slowly also produce high-quality drafts when they sit down to the computer or with pen and paper. These are the writers who also compose mentally; they test, reject, and rewrite phrases and sentences "in their heads" so that by the time they draft, they have done a good deal of the writing work. Watching them produce text, however, may be almost painful. It seems to be a struggle to produce each sentence, but they do little revising on the screen as they write. Other slow writers may simply struggle with writing, and for them, writing is a painful process. They search for words and phrases, keyboard a few words, delete what they've written, and start again, trying numerous versions of each piece of text as they produce a draft. When such writers have finished a draft, they may be quite unwilling to make much change in their text, since producing it was so difficult. Such writers may pause often in their composing and request feedback, needing reassurance of the worth of what they're doing and not wanting to "waste" effort in continuing on their present path if the result seems unpromising for successful completion. Sometimes this kind of painful process reflects earlier judgments of the writer's texts as poor. We have watched and talked with writers who constantly edit as they write, generating three or four versions of each sentence and deleting much more than they ultimately let stand, never satisfied with what they're writing as they write it.

Activity: Reflect on your own drafting processes. Write a two- to three-page description of how you draft.

Activity: Keep a log of your research and writing activities for a specific long-range writing project or for a specified period of time, say, a month. After recording data in your log, review it to analyze your writing practices, and report your findings in two to three pages.

Given this range of individual writing processes, all of which we see as normal, how can a teacher foster progress? The goal is for each student to achieve as much facility as possible in generating high-quality text. For the student to do this, he must know a good deal about what works best for him. Trying out a variety of writing practices will help him learn what works best. The student's own reflective writing about how well a particular approach works for a particular writing task helps him analyze and articulate his own best practices. As far as possible, plan your writing instruction so that students must sometimes produce a sequence of drafts, other times write rapidly to meet a deadline, select their own best work for portfolio presentation, and reflect on their own writing processes. Rather than teach them "what works," teach them "what works for some writers in some situations." This approach works better than following a teacher-dictated, routine writing process to build the students' knowledge base from which to determine the practices, or the process, that matches their verbal ability, personality, and particular writing tasks.

Probably the most important thing for students to know about drafting is that a draft is not finished copy. They should be told about professional writers who write successive drafts rather than produce finished, publishable writing under the force of inspiration. Movies such as Shakespeare in Love, Wonder Boys, and Finding Forrester make this clear. Interviews with writers make it even clearer. In his book Shoptalk, Donald Murray includes many quotations from writers, including these on drafting and revising:

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews series is a useful source of information on professional writers' writing processes. Ernest Hemingway told interviewer George Plimpton that he wrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times.

Activity: Read three or four selections from The Paris Review Interviews. Write a brief reading response, in which you summarize what is most interesting and what you have learned from reading these interviews.

Reviewing what one has written is a normal part of drafting. Writers seem to gain momentum from occasionally rereading from the beginning, and some writers benefit from reading their drafts aloud. Reviewing what one has written often prompts recursion: as the writer rereads, she may revise and edit before resuming the drafting process. She may even discover a gap in her paper that requires her to go do more reading or research before she can complete the draft.

We all face writer's block at one time or another, so students should understand that this is a normal aspect of writing. The individual who has a repertoire of prewriting and planning (inventing) strategies to draw upon can usually overcome writer's block. The alert and sensitive teacher can help a student who is stuck in her writing find the best strategy for getting unstuck. You will want to ask first whether the student is indeed stuck--she may be just thinking. If she says yes, you will probably find it useful to read her draft and ask a pertinent question, drawing on what she herself has written. If this is not enough, you may brainstorm with her for a while or ask her to do some freewriting--not necessarily topic-related--or encourage her to use one of the visualizing activities suggested above, perhaps by asking a question like, "If this were a Webpage, what would you link to here?" Sometimes "blind writing" at the computer helps the writer who is too critical of her writing: she should turn off the computer monitor and type without reading what she is writing, for as long as she can continue to generate ideas. She may find it helpful to talk with peers about what she has written so far and what she hopes to accomplish with this text, or she may be encouraged to email you or a peer about the writing problem.

It is not necessary that a text be drafted in the order in which it will finally appear. Some writers find it helpful to start drafting the section about which they are most enthusiastic or have the most to say. Lots of writers have found it helpful, when having difficulty writing the introduction, to plunge into the rest of the paper and then return to write the introduction later. (One of us, writing undergraduate papers in the days before the personal computer, wrote 10-page research papers at the typewriter, leaving about 2/3 page for the introduction, then fitting it into the space after the paper was completed.) If one section is posing problems for the writer, she may simply move to writing a different section.

Let students know that minor problems in finding the right word or phrase should not derail them from drafting. If they don't have a word in mind, they can leave a blank space in the draft or put a bold-faced question mark in the text like this [?] and return to the problem later. If they need more information or need to look up a fact or quotation, they can make an appropriate notation, such as [insert quotation about sunbeam on Pearl], and keep writing.

Encourage students who are writing outside of class time to take carefully planned breaks when they get stuck. A writer who's run out of ideas or can't figure out how to manage a particular portion of his text may find it helpful to state the problem explicitly to himself or put it in writing. Then he should take a 15-minute or half-hour break during which he does not think about the writing; he should determine the time before leaving his writing, telling himself, "It's 7:30 now. I'll come back to this at 8:00 sharp." It's useful to do something active in this situation--take a walk, shoot hoops, perform a task that needs to be done, play a musical instrument, sketch a little, have a conversation with a friend or family member--rather than sit in front of the television. When the writer returns fresh to the task, he may well find himself ready to write again. When a writing task is being performed over a period of days, it is sometimes best to "sleep on it" when stuck. The important elements in this approach are to articulate the writing problem to oneself and to set a specific time for return to drafting.

Plagiarism has recently been a hot topic of discussion in educators' professional forums and has generated media attention as well. Plagiarism is widespread and is seen as a growing problem. We believe this topic should be addressed in writing instruction at all levels, but should be approached as a subject for instruction in the ethics of using information, rather than as a "sin" students are likely to fall into when tempted to do wrong. Emphasizing the correct and fair use of others' ideas and words is in our experience more effective than threatening punishment when plagiarizers are caught.

When students are writing from sources, they are often writing about information that they have not yet mastered. Stories abound of children's copying information from the encyclopedia. Young writers copy information because they don't know their topic well enough to write about it in their own words. Often they are taught paraphrasing techniques ("Just change the words around") that inculcate the habit of plagiarism. Use of the computer as both research and writing tool has exacerbated this problem. Every year we are faced with cases of outright plagiarism in which students have copied someone else's words from an online or CD-ROM source and pasted them into their own document, failing to supply the quotation with quotation marks and parenthetical citation. Because copying is so easy, it is important for students at all levels to improve their ability to write from sources.

Classroom instruction in synthesizing information from sources can be integrated into the planning process, and instruction in accurate quoting and in paraphrasing and summarizing will help students avoid the plagiarism trap. As directors of writing centers, we sometimes see college students writing research papers with books open in their laps, looking at the book, then typing, then looking at the book again. We have difficulty thinking of this as "writing"!

From an early age, young writers can be taught to gather information from sources and make it their own, rather than simply copy it. The goal is that students will be able to conduct research in order to become knowledgeable about a topic and then write about it from their knowledge, attributing information to the proper sources but without merely copying it.

One method for teaching students to learn from a source without copying from it is to show a short, informative video, encouraging students to take notes. Then ask them to write a summary of the information. To immediately transfer this technique to information gathered from reading, distribute a short text on the same topic. Ask students to read the selection carefully, making only very brief notes. Then collect the text from them, or have them turn it facedown, and ask them to write a summary of the information from that text. To help them with synthesizing information from various sources, give them two additional texts on the topic, each containing somewhat different information, asking them to write similar summaries. Then assign a short essay or report on the topic, having students write only from their summaries and including parenthetical citations (author's last name or title only, without page number) where information comes from one particular source. Students may then be given access to their sources again for revising.

Students writing from sources should also be instructed in summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and documenting sources. A summary is a shortened version of a text, presented in the summarizer's words rather than the words of the original text. A summary should be based on an overview of the whole text or of a significant portion of it. Students should practice summarizing arguments as well as information. Select short nonfiction texts from anthologies or argumentative speeches from literary works, or choose newspaper editorials. Ask students to write summaries that identify the author's or speaker's thesis, the main points that support the thesis, and the evidence that supports the main points.

A paraphrase is an alternate version of the ideas and information in a text, about the same length as the original text, in the words and syntax of the paraphraser. A paraphrase is unacceptable if it reproduces large portions of the wording of the original, or if it reproduces the sentence structure of the original merely changing single words or phrases here and there. A useful class activity to teach paraphrasing is to assign the same short text to small groups, asking each group to collaboratively write a paraphrase of the original. Then paraphrases may be compared by the whole class, and a master paraphrase, combining the best elements of all groups' work, may be produced. Writing a paraphrase can be challenging: it requires a large writing vocabulary and a sense of syntactical alternatives. But the ability to paraphrase brings benefits: (1) students learn the ethical use of information and ideas from sources; (2) students gain practice in reading closely and critically in order to fully understand and rephrase the information and ideas of the source; (3) students practice finding alternative sentence structure and word choice, skills which will serve them in other writing tasks as well.

Instruction in quotation should focus on making decisions about when to quote and when to paraphrase or summarize as well as on the mechanics of quoting sources. Our students have told us about learning rules like, "Use one quotation per paragraph," but we urge you to avoid such simplistic approaches to teaching the use of evidence. We sometimes see a somewhat random sprinkling of quotations, apparently chosen merely to assure the teacher that the student has used a text, rather than because of any organic relationship to the text. Students should be encouraged to use quotations more frequently when writing about literature than when doing other kinds of writing, since literary analysis is focused on close attention to text. They should also be encouraged to use quotation when an idea is expressed particularly well or when quoting lends authority to the student's point. Quotations should not be allowed to carry the student's point, but should be introduced and commented upon. We generally encourage students to include their parenthetical citations in drafts, rather than accepting the statement, "It's just a draft. I'll put in the citations later," because we find that writers sometimes forget where information has come from when they follow this practice. In addition, students need to be taught how to delete irrelevant material in longer quotations by using ellipsis and to use square brackets for changes in verb tense or substitution of a name for a pronoun in order to make the quoted material clear in its new context. Again, stress the importance of representing the source's information and ideas in responsible and ethical ways. Rechecking quotations for accuracy is an important part of producing a good final text, but students can be encouraged to defer this to the revising and editing stages, rather than be tied too closely to their sources as they draft.

Go on to Planning Strategies or return to the Writing Process

By Alice L. Trupe, posted Sept. 10, 2001