Monthly Archives: March 2015

Photo of Hazel Hart

Writing: From Concept to Rough Draft–A Series Overview

Overcoming the Blank Screen

Whether you write with pen, typewriter, or computer, you will probably suffer a bout of writer’s block at some time during your writing life. To help my students get past the blank screen, I put together a prewriting guide.  In the next few blog posts, I will explain the various sections in the guide and the importance of each. Topics that will be covered in the series include freewriting on the subject, developing  the topic sentence or thesis statement, identifying an audience and purpose, and creating the working title and outline.

Write to Fit Project Planner

I discussed the Write to Fit Project Planner in a previous post. Once you have it filled out, it is time to move forward with the first stage of writing: gathering information. The Write to Fit Project Prewriting Guide outlined below is the perfect form to help with that task.

Write to Fit Project Prewriting Guide

This guide gets you started and gives you an organized direction, but your ideas are not written in stone. You may change any one or all of them as better ideas come to you. That is how the writing process works.

Freewriting: The Blurt

With the topic of your project in mind, set a timer and write for ten to fifteen minutes without stopping. One of the following questions may help you get started. What is your experience with the topic? What do you know or believe? How did you learn what you know? Why do you believe what you do? What people do you associate with the topic?

Connection

Explain your connection to the topic. Did someone you know teach you these things? Have you personally observed or experienced the examples given in the essay? Are you writing from experiences gained through a hobby, job, or course?

 Audience

Describe the people you feel will most enjoy or benefit from your essay or article. Consider age, gender, marital status, educational level, profession, and any other pertinent identifying factors.

Purpose

Do you want to inform, entertain, or persuade your audience?

Topic Sentence or Thesis Statement

What is the main point you want to make? If you are writing a single standalone paragraph, the main point will be given in the topic sentence. If you are writing an essay or longer work, your main point will be made in a thesis statement.

Working Outline

A working outline is a simple listing of the details that support your thesis in the order you think you will use them.

Concluding Sentence

Review the information in your previous answers and create a sentence that will bring your essay to an effective conclusion. As with all other answers in this guide, this sentence may be changed as better words and ideas come to you.

You may download a copy of the Write to Fit Project Prewriting Guide and use it to organize your writing projects. Come back to read in depth explanations on each of the components in the guide in upcoming posts.

 

© 2015 Hazel Hart

Photo of Hazel Hart

If at First You Don’t Succeed . . .

I’ve tried blogging several times without much success, so when my relentless friend and writing buddy, Bonnie Myrick, told me about WordPress’s Blogging 101 course, I immediately signed up. After all, my current blog is all about writing to fit any situation, and blogging is a situation with which I need help. You’ll see what I mean when you read the history of my blogging attempts.

Darksideduo

If you go to the Blogging 101 Commons page and check my avatar, you will see @darksideduo as my username. That name is the result of a blog that never happened beyond the signup stage. Bonnie, my above-mentioned relentless friend, and I had published a book of dark fiction titled Dark Side of the Rainbow. Advice from those who were supposed to know about self-publishing said a blog was absolutely essential to our success. However, once we signed up, we had no idea how to use the blogging tools. We lived fifty miles apart and signed up on my computer, which meant Bonnie was not present to bug me, so now all I have to show for it is a username I can’t get rid of.

Seasoned Aspirer

If I could choose a new username, Seasoned Aspirer would be it. It was the name I used for my publishing company when I published books on lulu.com. It was also the name of a blog I had on GoDaddy. It was my longest running blog but suffered from infrequent posting and lack of publicity. I started a version of Seasoned Aspirer on WordPress, but I couldn’t figure out how to transfer the GoDaddy posts to the new platform, so I had to start over. Seasoned Aspirer is now about doing things I always wanted to do–travel, get healthy, and voice my opinions on a variety of matters. My daughter recently said, “Mom, you have an opinion on everything.” She’s right, but those opinions don’t seem to be showing up on my blog. Wait! I have to write and post them.

A Spirited Journey

A Spirited Journey was a short-lived blog containing research for my 1855 historical novel. I went through GoDaddy, and when I didn’t pay the renewal fee, the contents of the blog disappeared.

Keyhole Conversations

The most successful of my blogging attempts was another partnership with relentless Bonnie. That’s because she was in charge of the design of the site and the actual posts. Keyhole Conversations was a video blog where we posted interviews with other writers. Bonnie did the interviewing and posting, I did the camera videoing, editing, and uploading to YouTube. It was a lot of fun, but I moved to Emporia, ninety miles from Bonnie’s home, so doing the video interviews was no longer viable.

Write to Fit

While the actual web address is my name, the blog name is Write to Fit. In January 2015, I retired from teaching English at a community college. Shortly before that, I published Basic Sentence Structure, my first e-book in the Write to Fit series. The second book in the series, Basic Sentence Add-Ons: Phrases was published in February. The purpose of my blog is to build relationships with my readers, answer questions about topics covered in the books, and blog about writing as a series of choices, such as the best punctuation mark, word, or sentence to fit the audience and purpose of the piece of writing. While my target audience is beginning writers and college students, I welcome those who care about writing to join me.