How to Write Better Essays

were producing was your final draft. It not only had to be right the first

time, it also had to be presentable. This meant that as soon as you’d

made a mistake, your flow of ideas had to stop while you got out the

tip-exto correct the error. Your creative flow was constantly interrupted

both for the correction of errors and to give you time to find exactly

the word you wanted, along with its correct spelling.

Now, with the word processor, it’s possible to divide up the task one

step further than we’ve already done with our stages of writing. By

having a planning stage, distinct from the writing stage, we’ve already

separated the two most difficult things in writing: on the one hand,

summoning up our ideas and putting them in a logical order, and on

the other, choosing the right words, phrases and sentence structures

to convey them accurately. But now we can go even further: we can

separate the ideas entirely from the choice of words and their correct

spelling. You don’t even have to worry too much about the sentence

structure and punctuation, because these too can be cleaned up later.

Freeing your ideas and creativity

If you think about this carefully, you’ll see that the whole process of

dividing writing into the five distinct stages of this book (interpreta-

tion, research, planning, writing, and revision), along with all the

advantages that a word processor gives you, is designed to free

you from responsibilities at each stage. As a result you can be more

creative and use more of your own ideas, many of which, you’ll no

doubt be surprised to find, like most students when they first do this,

are full of insight and intelligence.

We’ve all had the experience of writing the old way with pen and

paper or with a manual typewriter. All too frequently the words would

get hopelessly tangled up with the ideas as they began to flow like a

torrent. Your mind would make connections, analyse issues, synthesise

arguments and evidence, and draw all sorts of interesting contrasts, all

of which you would struggle desperately to retain and use. But as fast

as you fought to find the right words and their correct spelling in order

to capture these ideas, they would be gone and others, equally evanes-

cent, would replace them.

The mind simply moves much faster than our inadequate techniques

will allow us to record. Breaking the essay up into stages, and using

a word processor, both gives us the same advantages as using pat-

tern notes in the interpretation stage, rather than linear notes: it’s a

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