Rules for writers, Tenth edition - Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers 2021

Explore your subject
Exploring, planning, and drafting
A process for writing

When deciding on a subject, consider what you know and what you don’t know. What would you like to find out? You might find it useful to explore your subject with sentence starters. In the examples below, “X” is the subject you’re interested in:

Here’s something I would like to understand about X: .

What doesn’t make sense about X is .

Why hasn’t anyone asked this question about X: ?

The following strategies will help you generate ideas for your writing.

Asking questions

Questions are the engines of writing. They propel you forward, one question leading to another. Posing questions and exploring possible answers helps you investigate your subject. Try asking why and how questions that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Ask questions that allow you to enter interesting debates, gather multiple perspectives, and deepen your understanding of what’s at stake.

Talking and listening

Talking about your ideas will help you develop your thoughts and discover what your listeners find interesting, what they are curious about, and where they disagree with you. If you are writing an argument, try describing it to listeners who have other points of view to hear their ideas.

Reading and annotating texts

Reading is an important way to deepen your understanding of a topic, learn from the insights and research of others, and expand your perspective. Annotating (making notes on) a text encourages you to read actively — to highlight key concepts, to note possible contradictions in an argument, or to raise questions for further research and investigation.

Brainstorming and freewriting

Brainstorming and freewriting are good ways to figure out what you know and what questions you have. Write quickly and freely, without pausing to think about word choice, to discover what questions are on your mind and what directions you might pursue.

Keeping a journal or a blog

A journal is a collection of informal or exploratory writing. You might pose questions, comment on an interesting idea from one of your classes, or keep a list of questions and observations that occur to you while reading. You might imagine a conversation between yourself and your readers or stage a debate to understand opposing positions.

Although a blog is a type of journal, it is a public rather than a private writing space. In a blog, you can explore an idea for a paper by writing posts from different angles. Since most blogs allow commenting, you can start a conversation by inviting readers to give you feedback in the form of questions, counterarguments, or links to other sources on a topic.