Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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Thinking On Paper

author

V. A. Howard, J. H. Barton

category

book

Steps to writing:

• Generating ideas Write out everything you can think of; this is a process to discover and identify your thoughts. Record everything, including potentially conflicting information.

• Composing ideas Build a topical and a sequential draft: read over the notes, sort according to topic.

Label paragraphs/pages, add comments based on the observed topics and headings: this is the topical draft. Then rewrite with minimal corrections except for collecting the different pieces of prose under headings and accounting for comments.

The sequential draft is discovering a common sense sequence among the topics: mark out the ideas in the draft as leading/, supporting evidence, conclusion, etc. Think about the /arrangement of ideas that would suit the reader. Also include connections between these in the margins.

• Expressing ideas Incorporating notes from the sequential draft and the associated comments, perform the document while paying attention to format, style, grammar, tone, accessibility, etc.

Write to the audience.

— Kunal