5.1: From Topic to Presentation- Making Choices to Develop Your Writing

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Beth L. Hewett

Introduction

Every semester, I ask my students for topic ideas, and then I write an essay for them.* When we’re in a traditional classroom, they watch me write the initial draft using a computer and projector; they comment on the writing, and I present revisions to them later. When we work online, they receive copies of all my drafts with changes tracked for their review and comments. My students like this exercise—partially because they don’t have to do the writing, but mostly because they like to see what I can make of an assignment they give me. They tell me that they struggle with beginning the writing and that the model I offer teaches new ways of understanding writing and revision. I like this exercise for the same reasons.

This chapter addresses how to make decisions about essay development and revision. It pays particular attention to using feedback from peers, instructors, or other readers. While you’ve probably had a lot of instructor feedback and many opportunities to review other students’ writing and to have them review yours, you may not have learned
much about how to make revision choices related to such feedback. To help you learn about making choices, I present my own argumentative essay that I developed from my students’ feedback, and I analyze my decision-making processes as a model for you.

In this chapter, you’ll see various stages of an in-progress essay:

1. Choosing among topics
2. Brainstorming
3. Writing an initial, or “zero,” draft
4. Writing a preliminary draft that is intended to be revised
5. Using student feedback to revise
6. Completing a presentation draft
7. Considering how to make these processes work for you

The drafts, feedback, and commentary demonstrate how you can develop an essay from early thinking to preliminary writing to presentation-quality writing. Although there are many other ways to write an essay, this model may give you some ideas for your own writing. In addition, don’t be surprised if you need more drafts for your essays
than you see presented here. This essay was a short one (for me), and so I was able to revise fairly thoroughly in one step. However, a longer project usually takes me many drafts and many feedback rounds to develop fully.

My essay was developed much like your essays are even though I’m a more experienced writer. My assignment was to write an argument, so I was constrained by the genre’s requirements. The argument needed to state a position (my assertion or thesis) and had to support that position with good reasons and sufficient evidence to substantiate
those reasons. I had a choice of topics, but I didn’t have complete freedom to write about just anything I wanted. The topic I ultimately chose was one that I was interested in but knew little about, so I needed to do a lot of research. Because my class was taught in a completely online setting and because I was working from home, I didn’t have a
physical library to go to, so I used my university’s library search engines and the Internet for my research. Finally, I had only four work days to begin and complete a preliminary draft for student review; the process took twelve solid work hours.