Tài liệu How to Write

Tài liệu How to Write tài liệu, giáo án, bài giảng , luận văn, luận án, đồ án, bài tập lớn về tất cả các lĩnh vực kinh t...

[...]... you mean to write At this juncture you might give a moment’s thought to probable readers and to how you want to affect them But don’t imagine the reader in any detail yet: the present aim is to find out what you want to say Now that you have a rough idea how many topics there are, you can work out matters of scale This is an exciting stage, full of possibilities: you have complete freedom to put your... item in turn, ask yourself, How am I going to get from A to B in this paragraph? How many sentences is it likely to take? The answer may show that the draft contains too many items or— much less likely—too few You can easily adjust this right away, altering the number of topics to be treated in full (The other topics will be mentioned briefly or deleted altogether.) Allow for long quotations in your... with a cue to material stored elsewhere; a good plan is to arrange the phrases in a column Already the draft shows how many topics you are writing about, and so whether you’re roughly in scale You may also be able to guess from the sequence what the shape of an argument or exposition may turn out to be Reach out to it in imagination: is it mostly description, or narrative? You might try to decide,... Reading To write, you need first to read; ‘writing is an offshoot of reading’, says Anita Brookner Or writing can be thought of as conversation with people who are absent: when your turn to speak comes, it helps to remind yourself of what they have said Besides, ‘it’s always easier to draw from the storehouse of memory than to think up something original’ (Montaigne) To have ideas and words in memory, however,... possible topics, you can simply select the more promising ten But suppose your notes yielded only five topics? That’s not a disaster; you simply allot two paragraphs to each of the five Some people generally write more than is called for; others write less If you belong to the first of these groups you may find it helps to play a trick on yourself by pretending the wordlimit is lower—say 1,500 Then work towards... as 300 The few writers who seem to have done little outward drafting (C S Lewis and Norman MacCaig, for example) have tended to possess the sort of memory that enabled them to draft inwardly Ordinary writers had best think of two or three drafts at least, besides outlines Before you begin, there are preliminaries to think of BEGINNING 11 (see under practicalities) Some writers like to warm up by reading... around the text later (perhaps much later); it strengthens your memory But aim to keep the annotation brief: very short phrases are enough to sum up the content, note topics of interest, points to look up, arguments to question, things to remember If the text develops an argument, make a brief abstract of it How brief is brief? To begin with, your notes may be depressingly long—longer than the text itself,... futile to think of quoting more than a phrase or two Or suppose you are asked for a bio (biographical statement) of fifty words: effectively that implies three or four sentences, on, say, your education, work experience, and publications It is unprofessional to put finger to keyboard or pen to paper without any idea of the scale of a piece; no one has time to write words that will have to be discarded However... substitutes for thought 8 M AT E R I A L R E A D I N G If you plan to write much—certainly if you mean to write history or literary criticism or cultural studies—you will need a programme of reading Comparisons, in particular, call for a wide range of knowledge Acquiring this will take time: you are not going to become well read by five o’clock tomorrow But from the start you can taste books for yourself,... relevant to your viewpoint, or D R A F T S 19 only peripheral? Think, too, how you will get it across: which points are self-evident enough to be merely stated and exemplified, and which are going to call for extensive support Next rearrange the projected items to form a coherent sequence (this is easy on-screen; on paper it may require a new draft) Quickly reviewing each item in turn, ask yourself, How . rich enough to have the leisure, and democracy enough to have the inclination, to teach its whole citizenry not merely to write, but to write well.’ In my view, no country can afford not to do this,. guide to grammar, nor to rhetoric. Obviously not: look at its length, or lack of it. It is only a small book aiming to help you form ideas about writing, and to write whenever you want to. Writing.