Writing Better Essays - A Rhetorical Guide to Writing and Revision (Second International Edition) - David L. Rogers
Preparing, Creating, and Structuring Your First Draft
Writing Better Essays - A Rhetorical Guide to Writing and Revision (Second International Edition) - David L. Rogers
David L. Rogers [+]
Kingston University, London
Description
Chapter 1 sets out the first five easy-to-follow stages for the writing and editing process that the book encourages students to adopt or to adapt to their own taste. These stages include 1) a stage of constructive procrastination; 2) an enhanced version of a timed and immersive freewriting stage that the book refers to as “research generated writing;” 3) a planning stage; and 4) an untimed drafting stage in which students again immerse themselves in their act of writing, although not as fully as before, and once more allowing themselves to follow the flow of their thoughts, never worrying when they stray from their initial plan, never stopping too long to consider what they have written or how they have expressed themselves; and 5) an initial revision stage in which they enact a simple cut and paste to make the structure of their draft, which will typically be linear, circular and repetitive. An exercise accompanies each stage. When students have completed all five exercises, they will be ready to begin to revise the paragraphs comprising the body of their draft, most if not all of which will almost certainly be underdeveloped and overly general, using the knowledge of the structures of two main types of paragraphs they will learn about in Chapter 2 and the techniques and strategies for developing coherence explained and illustrated in Chapters 3-5.