Five Principles of Effective Writing
Five Principles of Effective Writing
Write because you have something to say. And watch Groundhog Day (again).
Published by The Writing Cooperative
A groundhog. Photo by Doug Brown from Pexels
I’ve spent a career helping undergraduate students with their essays and reports. Here are some of the messages I’ve found to be most helpful to them. They are both derived from, and generative of, useful ways of thinking about any kind of writing.
1. Draft your conclusion first
If you haven’t already decided what it is that you want to say in a piece of writing, then the chances are you’re not ready to start writing it. And if you have decided, why not draft the concluding paragraph immediately? This provides you with a goal. A place to which you know you have to get. A direction. And to me, the essence of effective writing is writing with direction.
Of course, writing is itself constructive. The business of putting words on a page can shape what it is that you want to end up saying. So, the draft of the final paragraph should be regarded as exactly that — a draft. But if you are ready to write the body of the piece then it’s very likely that the essence of the conclusion is already in place in your plans. A concrete manifestation of that conclusion ‘on the page’ can help you identify the elements of the story that you need to tell in order to get the reader to land where you want them to.
2. Have something to say
Perhaps this should be the first point in this piece. But I like to start with ‘write your conclusion first’ because to do that has a certain impact. When I start my teaching sessions on essay writing by talking in this way about the conclusion, students sit up and listen. It catches them a little off guard. The upshot tends to be a good proportion of heads nodding in the realisation that the idea is probably worth a shot. In a sense, this is the evidence that I am presenting to you that the ideas in this piece can be helpful in your writing. I’m not citing studies from the peer-reviewed literature. I’m citing observations from over three decades spent teaching this stuff. It’s one of my favourite things to teach about.
The whole idea of writing the conclusion first presupposes that you know what you want your take-home message to be. It presupposes that you know what this piece is about. It presupposes that you have something to say. This may seem an obvious point. Why else would you write if you don’t have something to say?
It turns out that there is a pretty important answer to this question. At school, assessment outcomes tend to be based on scores that accrue from the pupil including key bits of information in an answer (a short essay, for example). The marking scheme specifies what these key bits of information are. In the UK this applies to A level and GCSE exams. I suspect this is the case for other national school assessment systems also. Pupils know that if they include certain specific facts and concepts in their answer they will get a specific number of marks. For example, when my son did his A levels he knew that in one of his subjects he would have to write ‘correlation does not imply causation’, and for that he would get three points.
There are two perfectly good reasons for this approach. First, it gives credit for what a learner knows about a subject, and arguably this is the whole point of the assessments. Second, it enables a relatively high level of inter-examiner reliability to be achieved. It is comparatively easy for independent markers to agree on whether a given point was, or was not, included in the answer.
However, the approach can have seriously negative effects on what the students end up learning about writing. We spend a lot of time at undergraduate level trying to undo this aspect of their learning. In the real world (and we do like to think of universities as being a part of the real world — yes, okay, we can argue about that later over a beer) people do not usually write in order to show what they know. They write because they have something to say. We need our students to realise this about their writing. Admittedly, when they are responding to our essay titles they often have to pretend to have something to say, if they are not particularly interested in that specific subject area. But if they tackle essays on a ‘show what I know’ basis, they set about listing facts and research studies and theories, and their writing comes across as descriptive. As a consequence, they can fail to pick up the higher grades that are awarded for writing discursively.
With this in mind, we urge students to look at an assessment question (perhaps an essay title that has been set) and decide on their over-arching line of argument.
What will be the take-home message of their writing? If they can achieve clarity at this strategic level they can then set about researching what kind of content they need to include in order to make their argument stick. In working in this way, they will, in fact, show what they know along the way. But in not aiming to show what they know, they end up writing in a more discursive way. If they are writing in order to say something, then they tend to write with direction.
Being clear about your overarching line of argument — having something to say — is something that Craig Harper has also written about in his excellent piece for The Writing Cooperative.
3. Write from the point…
…not towards it. This principle applies at a global level (about the piece as a whole), at the local level (about each sentence), and at all intermediate levels (about each section and paragraph).
At a global level, it usually pays dividends to sell your take-home message — your overarching argument — in the introduction. In other words, the introduction and the conclusion tend to be rather similar in terms of their meaning, if not in the style in which they are written. If you set out the point(s) you want to make in the piece at the outset, the reader will find it much easier to follow your line of thinking than if you conceal your argument, and reveal bits of it as you go along. You have to be a really good writer to do this ‘hide and reveal’ approach in a way that doesn’t lose readers along the way.
Columbo and Agatha Christie
The longer I have spent teaching about these matters, the more I have become convinced that half the battle is finding helpful metaphors and analogies. Find the right one, and a student can sometimes have a moment of insight into what it is that you are trying to encourage them to do. I’ve had countless students tell me this (in not so many words) over the years.
One of the analogies that I use is based on a comparison between two different types of TV crime drama; Agatha Christie mysteries, and…Columbo. In Agatha Christie dramatisations, you don’t know whodunit until the end. The writer engages in the deceit of hiding information from you, the viewer, and only revealing the take-home message (the murderer’s name) at the end.
By way of contrast, you have Columbo. In this show, the viewer is shown at the outset who the murderer is. The drama revolves around the evidence that Columbo assembles that allows him to discover that information for himself. The upshot of the analogy is that in non-fiction writing, as a rule, you should aim to write a Columbo episode rather than an Agatha Christie one.
A very good friend suggested this analogy to me some time ago¹, and I have used it ever since. To be honest, young undergraduate students simply don’t get the references anymore, as they are somewhat dated. But I have found that they rejoice in my foolish nostalgia, and the point seems to stick all the better as a result.
The point is queen
The same general principle of making the main point upfront applies also at the level of sections and paragraphs. Generally speaking, a paragraph works best for the reader if you put its main point at the beginning, and then set about developing it in the remainder of the paragraph. Figures 1 and 2 show the same text, organised in different ways. The main point of both paragraphs is that the main point should come first. That point is made most clearly in Figure 1. The ideas expressed in Figure 2 are perfectly easy to understand, but if successive paragraphs follow this structure, the clarity of the argument going forward can be lost.
Figure 1. Writing from the point
Figure 2. Writing towards the point
This isn’t a law. Such things don’t really exist in the domain of writing. It’s a rule of thumb. Your argument will come through in sharper relief if the main point of any given unit of text — even within a sentence — is privileged in this way.
4. Groundhog day
The most engaging writing takes an idea and develops it in interesting and original ways across a series of paragraphs. Each paragraph builds on the previous one and develops the idea further. Then, just when the reader thinks you have exhausted all the intriguing possibilities, you present them with another. One that they perhaps weren’t expecting. But one that makes them go, “Oh yeah! I hadn’t thought of that.” Get the reader to that point, and you’ve won. That’s the holy grail of writing, right there.
What this makes me think of is the film Groundhog Day, which expertly takes the viewer through every possible implication of living the same twenty-four hours endlessly. And just when you think that there’s nothing more to say on the subject, yet another idea comes along. It is a tremendously rewarding viewing experience. If you can replicate that effect in writing, then you’ve made it.
5. Write your conclusion first
Yeah. It was worth beginning on this. It’s worth ending on it, also. And it’s worth saying twice.
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