Prewriting

THINKING ABOUT YOUR WRITING SITUATION

Once you have decided on a manageable topic, you are ready to consider your writing situation: Your purpose, audience, point of view, genre, and medium.

DETERMINING YOUR PURPOSE

A well-written essay should have a specific purpose or goal. There are three main purposes for writing.

To express yourself: For example, to express the writer’s feelings about an incident of road rage that he or she observed.
To inform your reader: For example, to inform readers about the primary causes of road rage.
To persuade your reader: For example, to persuade readers to vote for funding to investigate the problem of road rage in the community.

To identify your purpose, ask yourself the following questions.

Why am I writing this essay?
What do I want this essay to accomplish?

Some essays can have more than one purpose. An essay on snowboarding, for example, could be both informative and persuasive: It could explain the benefits of snowboarding and urge readers to take up the sport because it is good exercise.

CONSIDERING YOUR AUDIENCE

Considering your audience (the people who will read your essay) is an important part of the writing process. Many aspects of your writing — how you express yourself, which words you choose, which details and examples you include, which types of sentences you use, and what attitude you take toward your topic — depend on the audience. Your tone (how you sound to your audience) is especially important. If you want your audience to feel comfortable with your writing, you need to write in a manner that your readers can understand and that appeals to them.

If you were describing a student orientation session to a friend, you would use a different tone and select different details than you would if you were describing the orientation in an article for the student newspaper:

Telling a Friend	Writing for the Student Newspaper
Remember I told you how nervous I am about attending college in the fall? Well, guess what? I went to my student orientation over the weekend, and it was much better than I expected! I even met one of my teachers — they call them “instructors” here — and he was so nice and down-to-earth that now I’m starting to get excited about going to college.	College student orientations are often thought to be stuffy affairs where prospective students attempt to mix with aloof professors. For this reason, I am pleased to report that the college orientation held on campus last weekend was a major success and not a pointless endeavor after all. Along with my fellow incoming first-year students, I was impressed with the friendliness of instructors and the camaraderie that developed between students and faculty.
Language: casual	Language: more formal
Sentence Structure: shorter sentences	Sentence Structure: longer sentences
Tone: familiar, friendly	Tone: serious, formal

How to consider your audience. As you consider your audience, keep the following points in mind.

Your readers are not present and cannot observe or participate in what you are writing about. If you are writing about your apartment, for example, they cannot visualize it unless you describe it in detail.
Your readers do not know everything you know. They may not have the same knowledge about and experience with the topic that you do, so you will have to define specialized terms, for example, if readers are unlikely to know what they mean.
Your readers may not share your opinions and values. If you are writing about raising children and assume that strict discipline is undesirable, for example, some readers may not agree with you.
Your readers may not respond in the same way you do to situations or issues. Some readers may not see any humor in a situation that you find funny. An issue that you consider only mildly disturbing may upset or anger some readers.

For a helpful list of questions you can ask to analyze your audience, consult the "Analyzing Your Audience" box.

ANALYZING YOUR AUDIENCE

When analyzing your audience, ask yourself the following questions:

What does my audience know (or not know) about my topic? If you are proposing a community garden project to an audience of city residents who know little about gardening, you will need to describe the pleasures and benefits of gardening to capture their interest.
What is the education, background, and experience of my audience? If you are writing your garden-project proposal for an audience of low-income residents, you might emphasize how much money they could save by growing vegetables, and if you are proposing the project to middle-income residents, you might stress is how relaxing gardening can be and how a garden can beautify a neighborhood.
What attitudes, beliefs, opinions, or biases are my audience likely to hold? Suppose your audience believes that most development is harmful to the environment. If you are writing an essay urging your audience to sponsor a new community garden, consider emphasizing how the garden will benefit the environment and decrease development.
What tone do my readers expect? Suppose you are writing to your local city council urging council members to approve the community garden. Although the council has been stalling on the issue, your tone should be serious and not accusatory. As community leaders, the council members expect to be treated with respect.
What tone will help me achieve my purpose? If you are writing to your city counselor to urge her to support the community garden, a respectful tone is more likely to achieve your goal than a hostile one.

Considering your audience when it is composed of one person: your instructor. Instructors occasionally direct students to write for a particular audience, such as readers of a certain magazine or newspaper, but you can often assume that your main audience is your instructor. In most cases, it is best to write as if your instructor were unfamiliar with your topic. He or she wants to see if you understand the topic and can write and think clearly about it. For academic papers, provide enough information to demonstrate your knowledge of the subject (including background information, definitions of technical terms, and relevant details), make sure your essay is clear and understandable, maintain a reasonable tone, provide evidence from soures that are appropriate to your discipline, and treat alternative views fairly.

CHOOSING A POINT OF VIEW

Point of view is the perspective from which you write an essay. There are three types: first, second, and third person. In choosing a point of view, consider your topic, your purpose, and your audience.

Think of point of view as the “person” you become as you write.

First person uses first-person pronouns (I, me, mine, we, ours). First person is often effective and appropriate in an essay narrating an event in which you participated. For formal essays, many instructors prefer that you not write in the first person.
Second person uses second-person pronouns (you, your, yours). Second person is appropriate when giving directions, as in an essay explaining how to build a fence: “First, you should measure . . .” Sometimes the word you may be understood but not directly stated, as in, “First, measure . . .” Many textbooks, including this one, use the second person to address student readers; however, many instructors prefer that you avoid using the second person in formal essays.
Third person uses people’s names and third-person pronouns (he, she, it). Third person is prevalent in academic writing. It is less personal and more formal than first person and second person. Think of the third person as public rather than private or personal. The writer reports what he or she sees.

CONSIDERING THE GENRE AND MEDIUM

Genre is a term used to classify types of text — for example, laboratory reports, proposals, or blog posts. Each genre has its own conventions, or ways of doing things. A laboratory report, for example, has a specific purpose: To inform readers about how an experiment was conducted so that it can be repeated and to tell readers the results. It takes the third-person point of view, uses technical language, and includes the following sections:

introduction,
methods,
results, and
discussion.

To write effectively you need to understand the conventions of the genre and follow them closely. Reviewing samples of effective writing in the genre, either by classmates or those posted on reliable Web pages, can be helpful.

Medium refers to the means through which ideas are expressed and information conveyed. In your writing class, your primary medium will be printed text, but your essays may include visuals, and if assignments are submitted or viewed electronically, you may also include audio or visual files, animations, or hyperlinks to Web sites. Be sure to choose a medium that suits your purpose and your audience. (For example, consider whether your readers will have high-speed Internet access when reading your assignment.) Also consider the conventions of the genre in which you are writing.