Thoughts on Drafting

In this post I will be talking about the pros and cons of the tips that the Students Guide reading gives tips about writing an essay. I will be touching also on the differences of a QRG and an essay as the tips in the book apply to essays and not QRGs per se.

SEO "Content Writing Tips and Tricks", uploaded 18 Dec. 2012 via flickr.com, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic.

Things that are helpful for QRGs:

• PIE format: This is helpful because the QRG has a slight analysis component to it and when using the PIE format you analyze the quote as well.

• Organization: While the organization for the QRG is going to be different from the essay but the tips they provide for the organization are quite helpful

• Revision: The tips they provide for revisions are practically universal for all genres of writing making it one of the most useful sections in this chapter.

• Writing an Introduction: The introduction in this genre is very important because it essentially sets the entire background the "so what" and the context of the issue.

Things that are not useful for QRGs:

• Developing a thesis: While this section is useful when drafting an essay, for a QRG there is not really a thesis statement. The QRG is designed to be easy to understand and fast not an in depth essay about some central point

• Writing a conclusion: The conclusion in a QRG is different from an essay conclusion because in the QRG the conclusion is pretty much another section that asks the question "whats the future". The QRG conclusion does not act in the same way as an essays so the conclusion section is not as much help as it would be in an essay.

EDIT: After reading Victoria's and Chelsea's posts I realized that some of the things that I saw as not important in the first place actually have some sort of relavence.

1) The thesis statement is not useless because the QRG is helping to get at the central issues in the controversy.

2) My draft needs to have more evaluation of the sources at hand and analyzation of said sources

3) I need to shorten my paragraphs in the sections because they do not all need to folloe the PIE format.