Writing to Explain: Academic Writers
Santi Buscemi
I think it involves a great deal of critical thinking to put paragraphs together so that, in fact, one idea flows into the next logically and that the reader can follow. This is especially important in process analysis; the reader has to know step three completely and clearly before she goes to step four.

Sandra Carpenter
What makes a good how-to article and what makes a good process essay is basically that there's got to be a linear progression through the article. You've got to have a step…whether it's written as step one, step two, step three, or whether it says, "First do this, then do this, then do this…" There has to be a progression. You have to be able to follow whatever that progression is directly though it. It has to make sense. If you don't understand something, if something doesn't make sense from A to B to C, then guess what? Our reader's not going to understand it either. So you have to understand this, you have to sit down and pick apart each part of the paragraph, each particular sentence in the paragraph, you break it all down, and it's all sort of a linear process in terms of how to, but it has to make sense. You have to be able to do whatever it is the artist is telling you to do.

John Morgan Wilson
The more vague you are, the more general you are, the more you try to get away with not researching and not bringing that detail to your work…people know right away you're faking it. They don't want to read it, they don't believe it. But bring enough detail to your work, suddenly it comes alive, suddenly people want to turn the page.

Mike Rose
Whatever you call it this business of being able to set down what happened when in some kinds of sequence is very important in a number of disciplines and in a number of kinds of writing. Certainly in some kinds of a lab report or in an engineering course. In a lot of science courses where you're trying to report on a sequence of events either that you conducted or that you observed occurring over time. Then it becomes critical to be able to lay down events in writing in some kinds of sequential and sensible order. But if you think about it, the same holds true for the historian, or for a number of other disciplines where sequence…where events unfolding in real time become critical. And so the writer's task is to think of how to do that in a way that makes sense, is logical, but is also compelling. Also is able to take a reader through the process as it happened and in fact maybe even giving the reader a sense of what it looked like to see it unfold, what it felt like to observe this process play itself out.

Chitra Divakaruni
I think no matter what your field is, sometime or other during your life you're going to be writing how-to process papers. They could be in a letter where you're telling someone, a family member how do fix a certain dish, they could be when you're trying to potty train your child, and your processing the different elements and how to put them together. I think how-tos are a very important part of life. And an example of this is if you look at what is on the bestseller lists. Very often they are how-to books. They call them by different names, but that's what they are. How-to books are the most popular ones. People want to know how to do things.