Director, Environmental Studies
Professor of English

PREWRITING
English/ Env Stds 243

Introduction to Nature Writing

It is common among college students to write a paper at the last moment, not even deciding the topic until the night before. Needless to say, this is not a good way to write a paper. Such last minute writing does not give your mind the time to truly enter into issues and engage intellectual problems. Only if your mind wrestles with the material over an extended period of time will it probe deeply.

A second problem is that students have a tendency to write a “report,” a collection of information gathered and presented as a paper. However, the kind of paper required for this class is something different: an exercise in critical thinking that highlights complexity and probes deeply by wrestling with real problems of interpretation.

It is important from the beginning to think of the paper as process of exploration and discovery. In order to do this, the paper needs to focus on and be animated by issues . Every paper should center on--and be animated by--one or more issues and questions. It is important to identify them early on in the process so you can try to refine your notion of the issues, i.e., understand their component parts, other questions they lead to, etc. If you and the reader are very clear what your issues are, the paper as a whole will be more clear, lively, and probing. See “Barnhill’s Friendly Manual” for a fuller description of the kind of paper I am looking for. <http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/barnhill/Writing/writing.html>

What I call “prewriting” is intended to respond to these two points. It is a brief initial statement of topic, issues, and outline. There are three main goals to the prewriting.

• To ensure that students are working on the paper early, over a week before it is due.
• To make sure that the paper is focused on issues that require probing analysis rather than a report of information.
• To give me an opportunity to give initial feedback – even if it is only an “OK” – to the paper, in order to avoid a student writing a paper that is not appropriate for the assignment.

The prewriting is also part of the multi-staged approach to writing this paper, a system designed to maximize the quality of the final product (and increase your chances of a good grade):

• Prewriting , which receives comments from the instructor.
• First draft.
• Reading first drafts of papers by others in your peer-editing group. This helps you see how others are approaching the paper, and it gives you feedback on your work in progress.
• Peer-editing workshop in class, where students expand on ways to improve the quality of the writing and push each other’s thinking further.
• Final draft .

The prewriting should be typed, about a page in length and never more than two pages. This is NOT a rough draft of the paper but instead is like an outline of your preliminary thinking. (If you hand in a rough draft, I will return it to you unread.) The prewriting should include four kinds of items.

• Statement of topic. Either simply a term or a sentence.
• Issues you will wrestle with in your paper. There should be one or two overarching main issues, and many subissues. The issues should be simply listed, and they should be put in the form of QUESTIONS, with question marks at the end of each issue. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF PREWRITING.
• Tentative outline of the major sections of the paper. This is included in order to get you thinking about the structure of the paper.
• Concerns you may have about the paper.

Note: Do NOT try to come up with a thesis at this point. That might short-circuit the process of discovery as you wrestle with complex issues and competing interpretations.

Note: The prewriting is tentative. After you get back the prewriting, you may change the issues you cover, the outline you will follow, even the topic you will focus on. The prewriting is intended to get you going on a process of discovery, not to lock you into something before you begin the project.

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