Success in college writing

As students just entering college, they often feel annoyed when faced with writing
academic papers. We often feel clueless or struggle with the format of our papers.
As“ So you’ve got a writing assignment, now what?” written by Hinton, C.H. (2010)
says:"For some people, a writing assignment causes a little nervous energy,
but for you, it’s a deep, vomit-inducing fireball that shoots down your body and
out your toes.”When faced with our first writing assignment, we can feel
nervous, clueless and afraid that we won't get a high score. This article is a
synthesis of what I have learned about what I think are the most important
strategies in writing a good essay.

Starting at a first draft

To write a piece of writing we first need to write the first draft, and to write a
draft we first need to write a structured outline to help us write more
thoughtfully. When writing an outline, we first need to identify our topic, think
about what we want to write about, then want to write about how I want to
make my argument, write out each subheading, then want to think about what
I need to use to persuade my readers, list their arguments, and finally find
literature to make their arguments more convincing and fuller, find the right
literature for themselves corresponding to each sub Find the right literature to
correspond to each sub-point and write it in the outline.

Before writing the first draft, we have to put ourselves in the reader's
perspective to examine our article, whether we can believe it, whether it will
be interesting to us, and whether it will be interesting to us. The article “ How
to read like a writer” written by Bunn (2011), list a few questions:
What are the advantages and dis-advantages of starting with a quote? 
                         What about the advantages and disadvantages of starting with a quote from
the President?
                         How would other readers respond to this technique? 
                         Would certain readers (sayDemocrats or liberals) appreciate an essay that
started with a quote from President Obama better than other readers (say Republicans or
conservatives)
                        What would be the advantages and disadvantages of starting with a quote
from a less divisive person? 
                        What about starting with a quote from someone more divisive?
 
Those questions show the author wants the writer to ask himself a list of
questions.We sometimes don't need to think about all of these things, but they are
also the very prerequisites of a good essay. To write a good essay we must think
from the reader's point of view, because we are there to convince the reader, not
ourselves.
The first essay, mainly to determine their own ideas, let their own thinking uncluttered
once, so they do not care too much about our own writing sentences or some
vocabulary choices that make our writing more sophisticated, to play a decorative
role in things. In Shitty first draft, the author says, “First draft-The first draft is the
child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place,
knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this
childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the
page” (Lamott (2005))The first draft is very malleable, and we can polish our essay to
make it perfect in the second or even more drafts. After this we have to proceed to
the next part - revision.

Revision- make the writing better

The word "revision" may be somewhat unfamiliar to us, but it is not unfamiliar
to some professional writers. When writing a piece of writing, revising is the
equivalent of a cosmetic treatment, removing our flaws. We incorporate
feedback suggestions from our classmates and teachers, revise each point
precisely, and then consider sentence patterns, vocabulary choices that make
our writing more polished. In Revision Strategies of Student Writers And
Experienced Adult Writers, the author says “The experienced writers describe their
primary objective when revising as finding the former shape of their argument.
Although the metaphors vary,the experienced writers often use structural
expressions lich as "finding a framework,""a pattern,"or "a design"for their
argument.”( Nancy sommers,1981)These ideas from professional writers are very
good examples about revisions. When revising the first draft, we have to confirm our
framework and then craft it to make our words more precise and make the whole
essay more convincing. In Revision Strategies of Student Writers And Experienced
Adult Writers
The experienced writers imagine a reader (reading their product)whose existence and whose
expectations influence their revision process.They have abstracted the standards of a reader
and this reader seems to be partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and
productive collaborator-a collaborator who has yet to love their work. The anticipation of a
reader's judgment causes a feeling of dissonance when the writer recog-nizes incongruities
between intention and execution, and requires these writ-ers to make revisions on all levels.
Such a reader gives them just what the students lacked: new eyes to "re-view" their work. The
experienced writers believe that they have learned the causes and conditions, the product,
which will influence their reader, and their revision strategies are geared towards creating
these causes and conditions. They demonstrate a complex understanding of which examples,
sentences, or phrases should be included or excluded.
The author lists some examples of what writers have to consider about writing
a second essay, which entails making three points：exigence, audience,
constraints. Those will be discussed in the next section.

Rhetorical analysis- put all together

In an article called “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd Bitzer argues that there are three
parts to understanding the context of a rhetorical moment: exigence, audience and
constraints. Exigence is the circum-stance or condition that invites a response;
“imperfection marked by urgency:
The exigence can be extremely complex, like the need for a newSupreme Court
justice, or it can be much simpler, like receiving an email that asks you where you and your
friends should go for your road trip this weekend. Understanding the exigence is important
because it helps you begin to discover the purpose of the rhetoric. It helps you understand
what the discourse is trying to accomplish
the audience should be able to help address the problem
Audiences can determine the type of language used,the formality of the discourse, the
medium or delivery of the rhetoric,and even the types of reasons used the make the rhetor’s
argument.Understanding the audience helps you begin to see and understand the rhetorical
moves that the rhetor makes.
The Constraints of the rhetorical situation are those things that have the power to “constrain
decision and action needed to modify the exi-gence” (Bitzer 306)
Simply put, exigence is the problem we want to tell, the problem we want to
solve, the audience is the group we want to face, we want to consider which
group can help us to the greatest extent, and constraint is what we have to
use or some of our constraints. For example, when I was doing a group
presentation, the topic of our group was about accent discrimination, so our
exigence was to let everyone find out what makes each culture's accent
shine, and the audience we chose was education administrators, and our
constraint was our social platform: twitter. After we determine these, we can
proceed to write the draft afterwards.