Is writing easy for you, or difficult? Why?
What strategies are helpful for college-level writing assignments? How do you start your assignments that require a lot of writing?
When you write, what is the difference between writing a paper and writing a discussion post? What is the difference between writing an initial discussion post and a response to one of your classmates?
Writing might seem a very easy task but, usually, it doesn’t feel so after I actually start doing it. At first, I have so many ideas of what and how I can mention but when I begin writing I suddenly realize that none of my thoughts and ideas can be used to write the introduction. It is always extremely difficult to start – I know what will be in the middle of my text, but usually, it is almost a torture to come up with a good introduction. Probably, I spend most of my time trying to simply begin my writing assignments. The funny thing is, that after I finally write the body paragraphs, I simply cannot stop. I want to write more and more, so writing the conclusion is very difficult for me, too.
There are different approaches on how to complete a writing assignment successfully. Some people advise to conduct a research first, the others – to generate and develop the ideas. You might say that these steps have the same meaning but as for me, there is a slight difference between them. Generating and developing ideas is not necessarily equal to conducting research – sometimes you already have some knowledge (whether it’s general or not) and understanding of the topic, which might be enough for generating ideas about the given topic. Of course, it is always better to read more before you start.
Usually, the next recommended step is to outline a structure of ideas. Determining the structure helps us to approximately understand how the final result will look like. In this step, some people prefer drawing a scheme: they write the main topic (or question they want to discuss) in the center of the paper, then add ideas or questions all around and connect them with arrows. This might be a very good idea for visual learners because sometimes it is much easier to understand a scheme than a long list. All these steps can be considered as “preparing before drafting”.
Finally, we can start writing a draft. Even if we conducted research, wrote down some ideas, and determined a structure, this step might be still quite challenging. There is much advice on how to make things easier and the most useful one, as for me, is the idea about not editing “while you are writing because you will interrupt the flow” (Custom Writing, 35 Effective Writing Strategies for College Students). Some students might think that they are already skilled enough to skip this step, but this is not the best choice. Spending time on sorting ideas, writing the future structure, and testing it by writing a draft might lead to the understanding that there was something wrong or there are more important things to write about, as well as the different order of paragraphs might be more suitable.
The next step is “revising”, it consists of revising the text you wrote. It is a good idea to have some rest and reread your work later – probably, you will notice something you couldn’t see before or think of some new interesting ideas you could add (or delete). And, finally, comes the Editing. We edit mistakes, replace some words, change our style (if needed), and finish our text.
I think, that the biggest difference between writing a paper and writing a discussion post is the structure: a paper normally has a title page, abstract, body, and references while a discussion post can have only the body and references. There is no need to write a title page and the abstract – the forum already has a topic, the instructor’s post already contains the assignment, every user has a unique nickname and it is easy to understand, what the discussion post will be about. Another difference is that the writing style used in a paper is always strict and formal when the writing style used in a discussion post might be slightly informal.
The difference between writing the initial discussion post and a response to one of your classmates seems to be even more obvious: the initial post contains some writing assignment when the response is a reaction to what was written by your classmate. This reaction usually includes one’s point of view (if your classmate agrees or disagrees with you), what he or she likes about your work, what you might miss in your text or anything connected with the topic that your classmate wants to add. Sometimes a response contains a question – this happens when your writing is interesting and another student is curious about something connected with the topic, or if some details are lacking which makes it difficult to understand the idea of a passage (or the whole text).
References
35 Effective Writing Strategies for College Students. (2020). Retrieved from https://custom-writing.org/blog/writing-strategies-for-your-assignments
Writing for success. (2012) Retrieved from https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_writing-for-success/
College success. (2015). Retrieved from http://open.lib.umn.edu/collegesuccess/