Thoughts on Drafting

Fredrik Rubensson "diary writing" July 20,2013 via Flickr
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As the Students' Guide is mostly intended for essay writing, some of the information it includes is helpful while some of it is not so helpful for what we are doing. In this blog post, I will look at some of the advice from the Students' Guide and sort it as either helpful or not.

• Drafting a Thesis Statement

The book's advice regarding how to draft a thesis statement is helpful in some respects. In a QRG, we still want to have a governing idea that ties the whole piece together and this should be present in the lead/introduction similar to a thesis statement though we probably will not have something as cut-and-dried as an essay thesis.

• Writing paragraphs in PIE format

Writing paragraphs in a PIE format will be less useful for us as we have a less analytical style with a QRG. Organization within subheadings probably most closely equates to this but it will probably also be less formal as with a "thesis" statement.

• Writing introductions

Writing introductions applies to our purposes much better. We can use the books advice for writing introduction in order to craft an explanatory lead that gives readers a good idea what our QRG will be about.

• Organizing information

Our goal should be to organize information as logically as possible as a QRG should be easily "skimmable" for readers. This is probably the most important bit of advice from the book as it may even be more important for a QRG than it is for an essay. Information should always be organized in a manner so that it makes sense when digested in a sequential order.

• Writing conclusions

While we probably don't need a formal conclusion, it could serve out purposes very well to effectively wrap up our QRG so this is probably somewhat useful though less. The more the author is trying to support a particular argument. the more important a solid conclusion is. As we are trying to write in an unbiased way, it is lower on our list. 

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I read Bri and Alex' blog posts about drafting. I think that reading both of their blogs as well as a couple of others about drafting, I realized that for me personally, all conventions basically exist to promote an organization that is beneficial to the particular genre of writing that those conventions exist for. And in a QRG, as organization is very important, I think that any of the suggestions discussed in the book can be adapted to a QRG and are therefore useful if they personally help you with your organization.

1. The first thing I need to work on is adapting the PIE sentence structure's guiding ideas so I can more effectively convey information quickly and clearly in my QRG.
2. The second thing that I need to do is more effectively apply visuals and to space them out more effectively.
3. I probably also need to have a more forceful thesis throughout my whole QRG as that will help guide my ideas and prevent me from writing in a distracting manner that could draw my readers off course.