The Process of Writing Well

Slate saying Purpos (Medium) Audience / Writer — When I learned to write in my elementary school years, the teacher would give the class a prompt that my classmates and I then dutifully tried to answer. “Describe the life cycle of a monarch butterfly,” for example, or “Write about your favorite summer memory.” We are schooled from our earliest years that our purpose is to complete the assignment; the best writing reaches a broad, general audience, and our role as a writer is to keep out of the way as much as we are able to. But the kind of writing that is clear, effective, and meaningful does just the opposite: (1) our purpose is the claim we are making about the topic we have chosen, (2) our audience must be as specific as possible, and (3) we must have a solid sense of who we are as writer if we hope to communicate successfully. In addition, we should be able to name, understand, and articulate the medium we have chosen for communication to ensure that we are using that medium efficiently and appropriately.

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The Simple Math of Writing Well Copyright © 2017 by Dr. Jennie A. Harrop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.