There are many myths about writing and writers. Perhaps the most enduring myth is that people who are good at writing do not have to learn to write—they just naturally know how. Writing may be easier and more rewarding for some people, but no one is born knowing how to write. Writing must be learned. To learn to write, as Stephen King explained, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” That is precisely how The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing works—by providing both a Guide to Reading and a Guide to Writing for each genre you will be writing.
To learn to write, as Stephen King explained, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Learn to write by using the Guides to Reading.
These guides teach you to analyze how texts work in particular rhetorical situations. By analyzing several texts in the genre you will be writing in, you can see how writers employ the genre’s basic features differently to achieve their purpose with their audience. In other words, you will see in action the many strategies writers can use to achieve their goals.
Learn to write by using the Guides to Writing.
These guides help you apply to your own writing what you are learning from reading and analyzing examples of the genre. They provide a scaffold to support your writing as you develop a repertoire of strategies for using the genre’s basic features to achieve your purpose with your audience.
Each Guide to Writing begins with a Starting Points chart that will enable you to find answers to your composing questions. You can follow your own course, dipping into the Guide for help when you need it, or you can follow the sequence of exploratory activities, from Writing a Draft through Evaluating the Draft to Improving the Draft. Although many people assume that good writers begin with their first sentence and go right through to their last sentence, professional writers know that writing is a process of discovery. Most writers begin with preliminary planning and exploratory writing that at some point turns into a rough draft. Then, as the draft takes shape, they may reconsider the organization, do additional research to fill in gaps, rewrite passages that need clarification, or continue drafting. Essayist Dave Barry describes his typical writing process this way: “It’s a matter of piling a little piece here and a little piece there, fitting them together, going on to the next part, then going back and gradually shaping the whole piece into something.”
Essayist Dave Barry describes his typical writing process this way: “It’s a matter of piling a little piece here and a little piece there, fitting them together, going on to the next part, then going back and gradually shaping the whole piece into something.”
A challenge for most writers comes when they have a draft but don’t know how to improve it. It is sometimes hard for them to see what a draft actually says as opposed to what they want to convey. Instructors often set aside class time for a draft workshop or ask students to do an online peer critique. Each chapter’s Guide to Writing includes a Critical Reading Guide for this purpose. You may find that reading someone else’s draft can be especially helpful to you as a writer because it’s often easier to recognize problems and see how to fix them in someone else’s draft than it is to see similar problems in your own writing. The Critical Reading Guide is also keyed to a Troubleshooting Guide that will help you find ways to revise and improve your draft. The Guide to Writing also includes advice on proofreading and editing that you can use to check for sentence-level errors.