Review on Planning and Drafting Essay Writing

This reading outlines very solid guidelines on how to write a good meaningful essay. Beginning with the discussion about planning methods; purpose, audience, topic, tone, context and genre. Each is explained clearly in an easier way to understand. I found them helpful in planning and drafting my observational essay.

The purpose in my case is as the title implies portraying my observation. My audience is I suppose my classmates as well as our professor. I learnt that it takes having some information about your audience to understand the kind of language and topic they can relate to. It can only be effective if it is written specifically for certain audience. Finding a topic that fulfills set of requirements and interests me was a challenge. It needed to be something I observed where I can convey some message underlying the story. It also had to be an effective topic with respect to my audience. I thought of writing about my research program going on. But it doesn’t relate to everybody and it would be more technical and unattractive story. This reading however discusses some useful tools on generating topics and ideas relevant with the situation; free writing, brainstorming, clustering, discussion with friends and classmates etc.

Once I chose the topic and started writing it was a bit easier and flowed smoothly. The next key point was tone. I assumed tone constructs itself naturally if the writer is truthful. I think it would require some experience to build some fictional story where you have to invent characters and tone. Luckily though my essay was observational and I tried to put everything as I saw them, so it was not much difficult task to imply the tone in the writing.

I felt the same way about context and genre as I did about the tone. The context in which I wrote my observation is the exact setting in which it happened. I think it made it easier and offered me a chance to emphasize on organizing my ideas and drafting the essay. What made this writing more interesting to me were the writing examples given in various ways. It constantly explains the importance of crafting an effective thesis for different types of essays. One of the points I liked about the writer of this reading was that she recognizes students have social life too. Sometimes professors make it seem like students are just students and are only coming for that one course subject. I might have exaggerated but it happens. Anyway the author of our book considers other aspects of life and discusses ways of using time efficiently. To sum up I think I used several ideas I found in this reading to my writing, it was clear and detailed lesson on writing effective and appropriate essay writing.

Reference:

  http://josephomotayo.blogspot.com/2011/03/differences-between-creative-writer-and.html