Things You Can Do to Improve the Flow & Organization of Your Essay

Writing is the easy part. Revision is hard. But there are a few things you can do to help improve the flow and organization of your essay. Check out some writing tips below to help keep your momentum going.

Read it aloud to get a sense of the flow and coherence. Rewrite or omit anything that sounds awkward or nonsensical.

Make sure the first sentence of everybody paragraph sets up for the entire paragraph. This topic sentence should be like a mini-thesis for each paragraph.

Be wary of using too many transition words like first of all, secondly, in addition, however, and to conclude. See how your sentence sounds without a transition word first. Then, adjust accordingly.

Instead of trying to rewrite a sentence that just isn't working, start from scratch. Clarify what you want to say and then write a new sentence without looking at the old one. You will be surprised how much easier this is than trying to rework a difficult sentence.

Simplify. When in doubt, write what you want to say in as simplest terms as possible. Imagine you are explaining a concept or subject to someone who has not been exposed to it yet. Do not overcomplicate the language and wording. This often leads to confusion.

5 Quick Tips for Becoming a Better Writer

Thank you for stopping by the blog! We've put together five quick tips to support your writing!

1.     Read.
Read as much as you can. It can be anything: fiction, non-fiction, magazine articles, newspapers, memoirs, poems.... Don’t limit yourself. The more types of writing and styles you are exposed to, the more versatile a writer you will become.

2.      Write.
Write essays and stories and speeches. Write letters and emails and notes to your friends. Write without censoring your words and without judgment. Write what comes into your head and see where it takes you. Just the practice of expressing your voice and of stringing together words will not only build your writing skills, but also your ability to connect to exactly what you are thinking and feeling.

3.      Connect.
Connect with others who are trying to improve their writing as well. Attend workshops on writing skills. Ask questions. No one expects you to know everything there is to know about writing. If you’re not exactly sure what semicolons are used for, ask someone who might know (a professor, a writing tutor, a classmate, etc).

4.      Go online.
There are plenty of writing resources on the Internet that can help you with getting started, organization, and correct grammar and word usage. For a general place to go for some resources, try OWL at Purdue: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/

5.      Be Authentic.
Remember that your writing is a reflection of your thoughts and feelings. Don’t try to impress anyone but yourself. Be honest in your writing and let your words speak for themselves. 

Jennifer has a Bachelor’s degree in Math Education from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She has taught high school math in Bergen County for the past six years and has tutored all levels of math, reading and writing. She believes that writing is a form of self-expression - a way to communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings that cannot be expressed in any other way. When she is not working at the Writing Center, Jennifer writes short experimental fiction and creates whimsical jewelry.

Poet Julie L. Moore Talks Writing, Reading & Inspiration

I’d like to welcome Julie L. Moore to the blog this week, an accomplished writer and poet. Moore is the author of Particular Scandals, published in The Poiema Poetry Series by Cascade Books in 2013. Her other books include Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions, 2010) and Election Day (Finishing Line Press, 2006). A Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Moore has had her poetry published in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review Online, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. 

On Writing

My favorite part of writing is also the hardest part: Revision. Although I love the moment of inspiration like everyone else does, revision is what allows me endless opportunities to play with language, trying different words, exploiting their connotations and denotations, finding just the right one to evoke the mood and imagery and music the poem needs. Plus, that initial draft actually terrifies me. What will I write on the next line? How do I keep the poem going? That’s hard work—just as hard as revision—but in revision, the language chosen has a chance. In first drafts, I know I’ll be changing so much later on, it’s hard to commit to the idea by even writing it. I think this is why I sometimes ignore poetry ideas and won’t write them down. My inner critic is too negative and too bossy! Thankfully, my Muse silence her often enough so I can write.

On Inspiration

The idea for my most recent book of poetry, Particular Scandals, released in June of 2013, was inspired by my life experiences, to be sure, as well as by many walks along my rural road in southwest Ohio. In addition, a passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ended up serving as an epigraph for my book along with a quotation from George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Because I’ve endured much pain and many surgeries, as have some of my family members and friends, I wanted to write about that endurance, something I see as the balancing act between transcendence, which tends to downplay the particular, physical world in which we all live, and despair, which is often characterized by wallowing in the suffering. So I wanted to juxtapose the agonizing forms of suffering many, including myself, have experienced with blessing, joy, and wonder. Although not referenced in any way in the book, Jane Kenyon’s poem “Happiness” was definitely in the back of my mind because Kenyon was so adept at delivering such gorgeously wrought juxtapositions. I also wanted to explore theological and metaphysical questions to see where they’d lead me. The book is able to hold all this together, I think, because of the themes regarding particular, stark scandals that lead to suffering and death and particular, beautiful scandals that lead to wonder and worship. I wanted to explore the paradox of those two kinds of scandals existing simultaneously in one place or one person, too.

On Reading

I enjoy reading all genres—memoirs, biographies, and other forms of nonfiction such as Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks; novels; short stories; plays; essays and creative nonfiction pieces; and of course, poetry. I just love to read! Some of my favorite authors include Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Lucille Clifton, and Denise Levertov. Of those writers still living and working, I have been influenced by many poets, including, but certainly not limited to, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Rita Dove, Stephen Dunn, and Claudia Emerson. It’s ridiculous how many books (and journals) sit by my bed. I always seem to be reading several books at once. Right now, I’m reading Jeanne Murray Walker’s memoir, Geography of Memory, Geraldine Brooks’ novel March, and books of poetry by Susanna Childress, Sally Rosen Kindred, Paula Bohince, and Maurice Manning. And I recently finished Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees as well as Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.

On What’s Next 

I keep writing poems, and that’s about all I can say about my next book. Many of my recent poems are ekphrastic, as they respond to art, literature, and myths, and this is something I really enjoy writing. I’m also writing some persona poems—from the point of view of a stone in a field or a magpie on a fence, for instance. And I like that direction, too. I find myself trying to write myself—my first person point of view—out of poems lately. I like what I’m seeing in terms of discoveries I’m making. But I have no idea what the next book’s themes will be yet or what it’ll look like. I don’t write with a book in mind; I just write as the poems come to me. Then, after a few years, I look them all over and see if anything hangs together thematically. I’d love to write creative nonfiction pieces. One day, I hope to try my hand at that genre. I don’t see myself ever writing a novel, though, because it just seems too unwieldy to attempt! 

Check out Julie's book below: 

Media & the Writing Process

The most common use of media in the writing process is in prewriting. In most situations where you might have students do a reading as “research” or for background information before writing, you can use a media object. Media can be a way to introduce other viewpoints on issues that are not addressed in the textbook. Many teachers use media objects as a kind of electronic textbook supplement to provide materials that are more current.

Probably the two most obvious changes in the use of video in education over the past decade have been in the method of delivery and in creating learning objects. The growth of online learning has initiated much of this technology and pedagogy. Since WI courses will be offered both online and face-to-face, it is important to develop these connections for students.

A classroom teacher might have once sacrificed a class session to showing a 60-minute film—that is a less likely pedagogy today. At one end of the delivery continuum, the instructor could ask students to watch that film via a streaming media link outside of class. Obviously, this gives 60 minutes back to the instructor and allows discussion of the video to be the starting place for a class rather than it being the remaining minutes after viewing.

The problems that this approach might have – for example, the students didn’t watch the film before class or that you were not able to synchronously “guide” them through the video -  are the same ones teachers have always encountered in having students read material outside of class, and the solutions are comparable.

A more powerful pedagogical approach can be to select the most relevant segments of a longer work that focus student attention on content relevant to the course. Again, the analogy is to the use of excerpted readings within a course.

Connections Roundtable: Writing Center & Library Collaboration

The Writing Initiative was created with the goal to improve student writing across disciplines, and as a part of this initiative, the Writing Connections program was started. The Writing Connection involves collaborating with area schools to share the best practices in teaching writing across disciplines.

In 2013, we've expanded our outreach to include 2 and 4-year colleges in NJ and NY to share best practices in Library and Academic Support collaboration.

Our roundtable discussion with librarians, faculty and writing center staff will be held on Thursday, June 13, 2013 at Passaic County Community College, from 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM. 

The topics we will focus on include:

1.      creating sustainable partnerships between library and writing center programs

2.      fostering faculty support and collaboration

3.      improving information literacy skills across the curriculum

The goals of this meeting are to establish a connection among college libraries and writing/academic support programs that will continue into the future, share best practices and discuss challenges that we face in library and academic support collaboration.

The next post will share the findings of that meeting.

Twitter in the Writing Center: Guest Post by Mike Shapiro, University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center

I'd like to welcome Mike Shapiro to the blog this week. Mike is a graduate student and the online coordinator of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center. Welcome Mike!

In a post earlier this month on the UW–Madison WritingCenter’s blog, I argue that writing centers
have a lot to gain by establishing a serious, sustained presence on Twitter. At the heart of that argument is the observation that too many writing centers, including ours, saw Twitter as just another public kiosk where they could post announcements. Even though writing centers see all writing as conversation, we have strangely avoided the opportunities social media make available for entering into conversations with our students.

This observation is hardly unique. Jackie Grutsch McKinney identified this as a major failing of writing center Twitter feeds in 2010, and when Jennifer Marciniak followed up in 2012 she reached the same conclusion.

Our solution has been to monitor what students at our university are saying about their papers. Twitter makes this exceptionally easy to do. To see what our students in Madison are saying about the papers they’re writing, we can run a search for “paper OR essay near:madison,wi." Some of the other searches round up tweets that mention “madison” and essays, all the tweets that link to our website materials, all the tweets about writing centers, and so on.

As an aside, this powerful search is one reason Twitter is likely to remain an important force in campus life even as Facebook’s popularity plateaus.

Many of the results from this search are not relevant to our writing center, of course. The search picks up high school students, for example, and it finds many students who are complaining in unproductive language about having to write at all. But many students are tweeting about writing their essays, and when we find them we can easily respond with a note of encouragement.

This direct contact with students shocks many of the people who have heard me discuss our Twitter strategy, and it’s the part that shocked me when I first heard about it from our university’s social media professionals. After all, this is peering into our students’ lives and talking to them from an institutional account. As writers who have grown up recognizing a clear divide between our public personas and our private selves, many of us are uncomfortable with the thought that an institution can interrupt a conversation between a student and her friends.

But students who use Twitter do so knowing what they say is public. Many students choose Twitter because of its no-nonsense privacy controls. Almost anyone who has tried to change Facebook’s privacy settings has encountered the “friends of friends” problem: it is easy to set your account so that some people you thought couldn’t see your posts and comments in fact can. Twitter’s privacy settings are, by contrast, foolproof: your posts are visible by default to the entire world; by flipping one switch, the Twitter user can ensure you’re visible only to the people you want. The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced this month, in its annual survey of online privacy protection, that Twitter is the only major social network that fights for its users’ privacy in every arena (https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013).

Students who tweet about what they are writing are conscious of the fact that their schools can see them, and have been regularly delighted to hear from us. Here are a couple recent interactions we have had with students:

• Twitter 1
• Twitter 2
• Twitter 3

As these examples show, students who learn that our Writing Center has a Twitter presence will begin to ask us questions about our services, and to engage with us as part of their academic lives. As our director, Brad Hughes, has written elsewhere, writing centers occupy a privileged place in the university that allows us to be flexible and responsive to academic needs. By maintaining a conversational Twitter presence that listens and responds to student interests, writing centers keep an eye out for the next collaborative opportunity at the same time they help prove that all writing is interactive.