Use subordinate clauses to house subordinate ideas.

Put all the important ideas in main clauses, and the less important ideas in subordinate clauses. If you have two ideas of equal importance that you want to express in the same sentence, use parallel constructions or semi-colons. These two tricks of the trade are perhaps more useful than any others in suggesting a balanced significance between ideas.

Principle Six: Be In Control

Readers know when a writer has lost control of his sentences when these sentences run on and on. Take control of your sentences. When you read over your paper, look for sentences that never seem to end. Your first impulse might be to take these long sentences and divide them into two (or three, or four). This simple solution often works. But sometimes this strategy isn't the most desirable one: it might lead to short, choppy sentences. Moreover, if you always cut your sentences in two, you'll never learn how it is that a sentence might be long and complex without violating the boundaries of good prose.

So what do you do when you encounter an overly long sentence? First consider the point of your sentence: usually it will have more than one point, and sorting out the points helps to sort out the grammar. Consider carefully the points that you are trying to make and the connections between those points. Then try to determine which grammatical structure best serves your purpose.

1. Are the points of equal importance?

Use a coordinating conjunction or a semi-colon to join the ideas together. Try to use parallel constructions when appropriate.

2. Are the points of unequal importance?

Use subordinate clauses or relative clauses to join the ideas.

3. Does one point make for an interesting aside?

Insert that point between commas, dashes, or even parentheses at the appropriate juncture in the sentence.

4. Do these ideas belong in the same sentence?

If not, create two sentences.

Principle Seven: Write Beautifully

In your career as a writer you will sometimes produce a paper that is well written, but that might be written better. On this happy occasion, you might wish to turn your attention to such matters as balance, symmetry, climactic emphasis, parallel structure, rhythm, metaphor, and language. If you are interested in exploring these rhetorical tools, we refer you once again to Williams' book Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace. You will find valuable advice there.

http://www.bartleby.com/141/ - elements of style (guide)

Students' Advice for Students

Sharon Stanley '99 writes on
Clarity

Many years ago, when I was just beginning high school, I believed that good writing meant extremely complex, wordy sentence structures. The more difficult a paragraph was to plod through, the more thoughtful and academic it must have been. I packed my writing with passives, run-on sentences, and extremely convoluted structures to avoid any possibility of an overly colloquial or simplistic tone. In my years as a Writing Assistant, I have seen that many Dartmouth students share this concept of writing. But forcing your readers to reread a paragraph six times before they understand its implications is neither impressive nor particularly intelligent. Above all, I find that student papers could be most improved by making their writing more simple, direct, and active.

· Avoid unnecessary passives.

· Do not begin sentences with unwieldy and empty phrases like "it is imperative."

· Sentences should get right to the point without weighty prefacing.

· You should make the primary actor the subject of the sentence wherever possible.

· Don't rely on long lists of items all prefaced with the same phrase.

· Eliminate clichés and other trite expressions from your writing.

· You should also avoid opening sentences with "it is" or "there are." These expressions rarely add anything to the meaning of the sentence.

When writing papers, you should continually be asking yourself if you can make your writing any clearer. Using overly complicated structures to affect a formal or detached tone simply makes your paper more dull and plodding. While a lively paper certainly varies sentence structure from time to time, it should not be so convoluted as to bury the central argument in weighty but unnecessary rhetoric. Ultimately, your readers should find your writing clear and direct.

Ross Wilken '99 writes on
Revision and the importance of starting early

I had always placed great emphasis on research,planning, and outlining before writing, but I often found myself writing my papers only a night or two before they were due. When I finally realized the importance of writing drafts in advance to allow my mind to work through the ideas and discover new ones, and to allow feedback from professors and my peers whom I asked to read my work, a great deal of the anxiety related to paper writing disappeared. Because I allowed myself time to think, I became more and more confident that I was turning in pieces of quality work.

Ashley Brown '00 writes on
Writing as a process

Its hard to give advice on writing when I still don't feel proficient myself, but I think maybe that's the most important advice to give. Writing is a process;... you will never "master" writing....

There's no point when you stop improving. I think this idea is important to remember when writing an assignment for class. People often get stuck into trying to write a perfect paper, and agonize over things such as word choice and style. They also try to write it perfectly the first time around. In my experience I've found it easier to go through a process. The most important parts of the process for me are brainstorming and organization.

Brainstorming is important because it frees you to write down all the ideas you have and not worry about them being stupid. I think that a key problem with the way that I personally used to write was that I never would brainstorm. I would try to write a paper from intro through conclusion. This would make more work for myself often in the end because I wouldn't realize what I really wanted to write about until I was almost done. Its important to put all the brainstorming ideas down on paper; once I visualize, I can organize better.

The second part of the process which I find most helpful is organization. Creativity has never been a personal strong point, probably because I never took the time to develop it. I think many people are in the same position, and worry because their style isn't creative enough. One thing I've realized is that while creativity is wonderful, if it isn't working for you on a particular assignment it is much more important to get your point across clearly. Making outlines is the easiest way to make sure your thoughts are organized and coherent.

What works best for each individual differs, but as a writer with little confidence in my creativity I find brainstorming and organizing two of the best techniques to aid me in writing.

Louisa Gilder '00 writes on
The importance of being personally invested in your writing

My freshman year, I never asked myself why I spent so much more time working on my studio art projects than on my English papers. I would spend countless hours late at night and into the morning laboring over a drawing, my hands and face covered with charcoal in the basement of my dorm, listening to the rolling stones. I would agonize over them until I was sure they were perfect, not being able to bear submitting something that was less than I knew how to do.

My papers, on the other hand, I would write as quickly as possible, checking "word count" every paragraph in case by some miracle I had extended the paper to three pages in the last five sentences. I viewed them as irritating assignments and only put enough energy into them to get by.

But when I thought seriously about this situation, I realized how ludicrous it was that I viewed a drawing as a part of myself, but that I saw a paper as no more personal than a multiple choice test. I have learned that it is important to view a paper as a work of art that you are creating, and not the answer to a question your professor asked or a job that you must complete. I found that when I approached my paper with this in mind, I became so much more wrapped up in the outcome of the paper and how I put it together. It is worth it to get excited about what you are writing about, to find an angle that you truly identify with or want to think about in more detail. You will find that you are left with an essay or research paper that you will be glad that you have written and that you will look back on it long after you have forgotten what the assignment was or the name of the class.

Leda Eizenberg '00 writes on
The value of outlining after you write

My favorite way to improve structure and ensure that my paper supports its thesis is to make an outline AFTER the paper is written, based on the draft itself. I state the thesis, and put this idea at the top of the outline. Then I go through the paper, pulling out the main ideas and prime examples from each paragraph and use them to form the body of the outline. From there, I get a general idea of the paper's movement, and each idea's relevance becomes clear. I then leave what is good, move what is out of place, and scrap what does not fit. I find this process to be the best way to really improve a paper; it enables a writer to step back from her work, which makes for a more objective, and thus better, critic.

Rita Mitchell '00 writes on
Clarity

My best piece of advice for students writing essays is to say what you mean. One of the most difficult aspects of writing is getting what is in your head onto the page. So often, what we imagine ourselves saying is not actually what comes across to our reader. One frequent result is that we write long, tangly, confused sentences, like this one, trying to include as much information as we can, saying it in as many different ways as we can, so that our reader will somehow be illuminated with the understanding and logic that exists in our own minds. This rarely happens in practice. Instead, the reader faces a confused and tangly argument with no visible point. While beautiful prose is certainly a wonderful stylistic plus to any paper, it is useless if the organization and argument of the paper is lost in beautiful, but meaningless, phrasing. SO, try to be concise. Use topic sentences. Try to stick to the practice of 1 Idea = 1 Paragraph. Read your paper aloud to see if you yourself get lost in your prose. And read your paper to someone else if you can, to see if your argument convinces him or her in the way that it should.

Christina Krettecos '00 writes on
The writing process

Tutoring for the Composition Center, I've seen many students struggle with similar types of writing problems. When a student is stuck without an idea for a paper topic, I advise him/her to take a piece of paper or sit down at a computer and free write on the topic. Often, after writing for awhile without a specific direction, a student finds an interesting idea or a general direction for the paper. When a student has a paper jumbled with too many ideas, I suggest outlining the main idea of each paragraph. By doing so, a student can see whether the ideas follow a general pattern and how to better organize them. The most important piece of advice I give to tutees is to constantly revise, because writing is a continual process.

Kinohi Nishikawa '01 writes on
The importance of getting personally involved with your writing

Let's get this straight once and for all: creative, insightful, and enthusiastic writing never travels down a one-way street. Too many of us think writing is an action that necessarily isolates the subject of our criticism; that is, a lot of us tend to place our subject on a pedestal and write about it from afar or, in many cases, from below. And while maintaining a critical distance is essential for all types of writing, stepping back too far can be alienating and frustrating for any writer, even the experienced one.

My best advice is to establish a "dialogue" with your subject. Ask questions; relate the subject's "life" to your own; argue, agree, laugh, and play with it; exercise restraint and be sensitive to its "feelings;" and most important, understand where your subject is coming from so that you know where to position yourself in relation to it.

Don't be afraid to initiate a conversation between you and your subject. This, in my opinion, is the stuff good writing is made out of. Just because your subject doesn't "respond" doesn't mean that your reading audience isn't listening.

Nils Arvold '00 writes on
Things that work for him

If you're careful in your approach, you can do the majority of your revision AS you write. Which means you want to spend the time on your ideas and sentences as you work, not after you've thrown a big mess of tangled and inarticulate ideas all over the page.

Most people in college tell you to throw the 5-paragraph essay format out the window when you arrive, but I think it has some value as a guide. The introduction should introduce a specific aspect of a work of literature very generally, with a quotation perhaps, and narrow to a specific thesis statement that addresses not only thematics, but structure (words, etc.). All of the paragraphs should support the thesis, as well as almost all of the sentences, and each paragraph should argue a specific point of the thesis. The conclusion does a little bit of summary and makes more general comments that reflect on what has been argued.

That doesn't seem to be too formulaic - it leaves a lot of room for 'personal style' and approaches to making an argument - and yet it doesn't seem too far off the standard guide. Even if you are only writing about an author's themes, always pay strict attention to detail, namely individual word/phrase choices. This means quoting apt phrases frequently in your paper, if the particular words in that phrase are important in themselves. Writing a great paper means READING very closely.

Julia Henneberry '99 writes on
Voice and tone, and the importance of reading other people's papers

I think the biggest problem I have had with my writing is "voice." I would get into this strange "paper-writing mode" where I'd forget that the point of a paper is just to clearly communicate a set of ideas. Long sentences. Complicated structures. I'd read the paper out loud (which by the way is always a good idea), and it would sound awkward. Writing in a journal has really helped me to develop a voice. I know everyone doesn't have time for a journal (let's be honest, I don't have time for a journal!), so maybe if we think about what that writing does, we'll be able to benefit from it.

I think the casual tone of personal writing is what really helped me. I've learned that this can be applied to formal papers. While it is important to maintain a sophisticated and mature style when composing for classes, it's also important to "speak" to your readers. I think that keeping this in mind when writing and revising can significantly improve a paper.

I've also benefited significantly from reading and critiquing other people's papers. I've become much more aware of the overall structure of a paper, how to support a thesis, how to write introductions and conclusions, and everything really! I think exchanging papers with classmates for a "peer review" is a fabulous way to learn about writing and the writing process.

Lauren Allan-Vail '99 shares
A few thoughts on writing

· I like to develop an outline and write my thesis sentence before I start writing the body of a paper. This always helps me organize my ideas before I start writing, and helps me make sure I know where my arguments are going.

· I try to write about things that really interest me, that I'm passionate about - my enthusiasm comes across in the language and keeps me inspired to write.

· I try to remember that although the development of whatever argument I am making may be perfectly clear in my own mind, it may not always be clear to the reader. I try to be as specific as possible in my language so the reader doesn't have to guess about where I'm going as she reads.

· And I come to the Composition Center as often as I can, even though I work there! There's nothing like getting someone else's perspective on a paper that you're so absorbed in or sick of that you can't see where you need to work on things.

Andrew Berglund '00 writes on
The importance of clear logic

I like to think of a paper like a mathematical proof (just think of high school geometry). A good paper proves its point because the reader never has an opportunity to question the writer's logic. First, the introduction makes a clear and reasonable claim. Then each sentence follows logically from the one before, always with the goal of bringing the reader nearer to the writer's conclusion. The same goes for paragraphs, chapters, sections, and volumes. If each one follows from the one before, and logically flows into the next, then the reader never has a chance to disagree. By making sure the reader is there for every step, then the reader must be there at the end of the race!

Usually, the paper's point is obvious to the writer, so the hard part of writing is finding every little logical step that will lead the reader to the same conclusion. I like to use an outline to find those connections. Once I've established the bare minimum - the points that must be made - then I worry about how to present those ideas smoothly and eloquently.

Karen Meteyer '99 writes on
The importance of starting early

The best strategy for writing college papers is to start them EARLY. Even if I just create a document on my computer desktop a couple of weeks or ten days ahead, it gets me thinking about the assignment that I will be writing. At this time, I try to jot down a few sentences or even the first paragraph, and a rough outline of ideas. Then, as the days go by before the paper is due, I fill in the blanks, writing a paragraph or two at a time. I find this gradual process lets me write a more well-thought and clear paper. I am continually writing some, setting it aside, and then returning later to revise and write more. Best of all, I avoid last minute panic and those painful all-nighters.

In my revising stages I always print out a hard copy of what I've written so that I can read it out loud to myself. This helps tremendously in both finding errors and in assuring a clear and consistent style throughout the paper. If at all possible, I get someone else to look over the paper as well.

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