If it’s a promotional piece, your tone needs to be engaging and highlight the benefits of whatever you’re promoting. Usually, figuring out the right tone for your writing is easy-if it’s an essay or another piece of academic writing, it needs a formal tone. This is also the stage where you clarify the tone you’ll use in your work. Working with credible sources gives your writing a strong foundation, while weak sources undermine the position your writing takes. Your sources’ job is to support your writing.

Data from health-supplement industry journals.

Insight on mushrooms’ health benefits from accredited health experts (think nutritionists, doctors, and other healthcare providers).

For example, if you’re writing an article about the rising popularity of mushroom-based health supplements, effective sources may include: With other kinds of writing, appropriate sources are relevant sources. For an academic writing assignment, the range of acceptable sources you can use is typically limited to academic articles, government or nonprofit research groups, and, if you’re writing a literature review, the literary works you’re comparing in your writing. Make sure your chosen sources are appropriate for your writing before you decide to use them. If this is the case for your current assignment, this stage is the point at which you should familiarize yourself with the applicable style guide and its formatting requirements for citations. With certain types of writing, you’ll need to cite your sources. Choosing authoritative sourcesĪt this stage, you’ll also identify which sources to use. It can be helpful to look at outline templates online, especially if you’ve been assigned a type of writing that you haven’t done before. It provides a structure that helps ensure your ideas flow logically and clearly. Īn outline is basically a skeleton of a finished piece of writing that maps the topics you’ll cover and where each paragraph fits into the piece. In this stage, you’re taking all the ideas, connections, and conclusions you encountered during your brainstorming session and organizing them into an outline. The next step in the writing process is preparing to write. Once you have a clear central theme for your writing and a strong grasp on your supporting arguments, it’s time to finesse your brainstorming results into a logical outline. A video script that walks your viewers through a specific knitting technique requires a much different tone, structure, and vocabulary than an academic research proposal for your master’s program in marine biology.

Think about the type of writing you’re doing and whom you’re writing it for.

The goal here isn’t to create a coherent piece of writing-it’s to clear a path for your writing.īrainstorming isn’t just about developing a clear topic and set of supporting content to cover it’s about determining the most effective way to present your information to your intended audience. Jot down every idea you have while you brainstorm, even if it’s only tangentially related to your topic. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz represented this debate through specific imagery. As you brainstorm, you might zero in further on how it was portrayed in pop culture and decide to write your essay on how L. įor example, if you’re writing about key events in American history during the Gilded Age, you could decide to focus on the debate surrounding the gold standard that occurred during that time. If you’ve been assigned to write within a fairly broad area, this is the point where you narrow your topic down to a specific thesis statement. When you brainstorm, you think deeply about the topic you’ll be covering in your writing and let your mind follow any and every lead it comes across. Do an internet search for the topic you’ll be covering to get a stronger grasp on it and all the potential directions your writing can take.

ĭepending on the assignment, you may be given a topic or you may have to create one yourself. The writing process actually starts before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

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