How to Survive: Writing

By my observation, Cal Poly is a campus
full of engineers and other such math-based majors, all of whom have wonderful talents and skills, but don’t really know how to write.

This is by no means an insult to them. I
respect people who can do complicated equations, design the objects which shape the routine of my very life or type out long series of codes. I can’t do that easily. But, I can write and writing, I believe, is equally as important.

After all, someone’s got to write the textbooks that we pay hundreds of dollars for.

First, all writing should start with an idea. Whether it be teacher-assigned or your own, writing without any direction usually fails. It can be anything, really; whatever you want. As long as it makes sense (and if it doesn’t make sense, I really hope it’s fiction).

Second, writers must do research. This
part is the most complex and usually depends on what you’re writing. As a journalist or a researcher, the research is usually extensive or at least time-consuming. Journalists are forced to have many skills outside of merely being able to write a few clever turns of phrase.

Journalists must know how to talk to people, ask questions, get all sorts of
information (some of which you might think was private), read between the lines, and generally be a sort of jack of all trades.

Likewise, anyone writing an essay or a
book is going to have to research a subject. Whether it’s a five page paper on how World War I started or 500 pages of a fictionalized version of the same events, they all must study so that what they write
will be historically correct. And, of course, accuracy is key.

That’s where the third step comes in;
editing. Editing is almost as important as the actual writing itself. Without editing, we’d probably see a lot more mistakes hitting our newsstands and bookshelves everyday.

Every writer edits their work. It’s
important since every error could cost you points or your credibility, whether it’s grammatical or factual.

Factual errors are more devastating than
others because it destroys the rest of your piece and, possibly, your credibility, or your entire career as a writer. Plagiarism is the most common writing affliction amongst students, which is why schools go
to such extensive measures to scare students into not plagiarizing and harshly punishes those who do.

Plagiarism is easy to avoid. If you want
to put a direct statement from one of your sources into your paper, then say where the statement came from. You can use footnotes, endnotes, “said ____” or my personal favorite: “according to.” (On a side note,
you can’t say “according to” a person, only “according to” a thing. Weird.)

For those who are tempted, if you’re going to take a passage from somewhere, make sure you at least change words and/or sentence structure in such a way that it is more or less different enough that you won’t get in trouble.

Either way, you shouldn’t be plagiarizing
because you’re college students. But do edit yourself as much as you can, you’d be amazing how easy it is to miss a spelling error.

Oh, the writing? You actually wanted to
learn how to write? Well just string a bunch of sentences along in a semi-plausible form and you’ll do just fine on all of your essays. (Unless you didn’t do your research.)