Worth Weller

• First-year composition students often write what I call “flat” essays:
• I often suspect that you take a thought, plop it down on paper, and then you are so proud of it that you repeat it in several different ways, more or less circling and recycling the same thought until you are bored with it.
• Then you go on to another (often unrelated) thought, draw a few word circles around it.
• Then you go back and repeat yourself a little bit and pray you are done with the essay.

• Of course, your essays wind up short, and you are puzzled why.
• Sometimes students describe these essays to me as “sounding highschoolish.”

• The real problem is that these essays lack depth they are not “developed” to any degree, nor in any logical order...
• Rather than patiently and skillfully developing each thought to its maximum potential before going on to the next logical thought,
• you’ve rushed the process, cheating yourself of the possibility of reaching the page length requirement and cheating the reader of being entertained by a meaningful essay.

• Following is a step by step method of developing essays that do not sound
“high-schoolish.”

• write a well crafted introduction that
(generally) contains a focused thesis statement.

• make a smooth transition into a paragraph that opens with your most major thought as the controlling sentence of this paragraph.

• in the same paragraph, state why the thought is important
• (this actually might be a linked sentence that is linked by “because,” if there is a cause and effect relationship).

• Illustrate the thought with a comment from your own life
•Or a quote from a text.
•Or some specific examples

• State clearly why you used that illustration.

• Make sure you have been as specific as possible and have completely listed out all possibilities of words or statements that might otherwise be vague or unclear.

• Determine which thought might follow logically from this first body paragraph, use a transition, and repeat steps 2 – 6.

• Continue in this fashion until you are ready for your conclusion .

• Make sure your conclusion wraps back neatly to your introduction.

• REVISE to take out all junk words and to make sure each paragraph only contains sentences that relate specifically to that paragraph. Check to make sure the organization of the paragraphs follows some sort of logical order that is made apparent by your transitions.

• Although quilting is my hobby, I hope someday to make it my profession. In the meantime, I am not going to quit my day job. I am going to college to study graphic design and accounting.

• One paragraph about why quilting is her hobby - how did you get started, etc.
• A second paragraph about how it can become a profession - what exactly is the professional world of quilts?
• A third paragraph about going to college - why is this important?

• See pp. 332-42 of your Handbook