Thoughts on Drafting

For writing the rough draft of the QRG, we looked at advice that our Student's Guide had on different, key aspects of a successful essay. In this post, I will reflect on what I found useful and what didn't fit in with the QRG genre.

"Man sitting at drafting board" 11/19/11 via the National Archives and Records administration.

Helpful Points

The PIE format was helpful information. During my junior high and high school years, this format has been drilled into my brain so most of it comes naturally and doesn't need to be thought about. I didn't quite succeed on all parts of PIE in my rough draft. I think my point and explanation are strong but illustration needs work. Most of my "illustration" came from general information or paraphrasing. I will look back on my rough draft with this in mind and hopefully add more sources in the process.

A few points in the "Tips for Writing Introductions" section are helpful. Grabbing the reader's attention is definitely something that needs to be done. The way QRG's are written helps this by the fact that they are broken up into subcategories so that the reader doesn't drain their attention span completely. QRG's still need a good hook at the very beginning so that people actually care about these subjects. Avoiding the "too much information" trap is also good advice to keep in mind while writing an intro. Sometimes I just write what's on my mind which quickly goes from an introduction to my whole case and point.

The whole conclusion section is useful to me. When I was writing the conclusion, I was at a loss of what to write about so I just summed up the arguments, but this gives plenty of content to write about in the final section. I need to keep in mind that this is the last thing readers will read so it needs to "drive my message home".


Not So Helpful Points

The entire thesis section is irrelevant to this genre. We do not have a thesis statement.

Some parts of the "Tips for Writing Introductions" are not helpful. We do not need to forecast the direction of the QRG - that's what subheadings are for. As long as our subheadings have some sort of logical flow, the direction doesn't need to be clear but it needs to be intuitive. So I guess in a way it is clear. One of the tips is "include a thesis statement". See brief paragraph above.

It seems to me that a lot of the organization advice is irrelevant to this genre. Most of their advice has to do with transition which I completely excluded from my QRG. The subheadings and short paragraph conventions of the QRG eliminate the need for well thought out transitions. Like I said before, the next paragraph should be intuitive and no transition is needed.


Reflection:
After reading the posts by Morgan and Mika, I decided I need to make these changes to my QRG:

1. I need to remove my bias from the QRG. I thought it said that we needed that in the final draft somewhere on the rubric but I read through it again and it in fact does not.
2. Make a more intriguing introduction and conclusion.
3. Make my evaluation of sources more concise so that it fits the standard paragraph length of this genre.