Writer's Guiderlines: The Writing Process: Stage Two

1. The most important advice this book can offer you is state your controlling idea and support it. If you have no controlling idea-no topic sentece for a paragraph or thesis for an essay-your writing will be unfocused and your readers may be confused or bored. But if you organize your material well, so that it supports and develops your controlling idea, you can present your views to your readers with interest, clarity, and persuasion.

2. An effective controlling statement, called the topic sentence for a paragraph and the thesis for an essay, has both a subject and a treatment. The subject is what you intend to write about. The treatment is what you intend to do with your subject.

3. Three tools can help you organize your supporting material: listing, clustering, and outlining.

•listing presents support material as a column of items in a useful squence (time, speace, or importance).
•Clustering uses chains of circles radiating from a central double-bubbled circle to show the relationship of ideas.
•Outlining can be used in two ways: to plan the structure and content of something you intend to write and to reveal the structure and content fo something you read.
A typical outline looks like this:

Main Idea (will usually be the topic sentence for the paragraph or the thesis for the essay)

I. Major support

A. Minor support
1. Explanation, detail, example
2. Explanation, detail, example

B. Minor support
1. Explanation, detail, example
2. Explanation, detail, example

II. Major support

A. Minor support
1. Explanation, detail, example
2. Explanation, detail, example

B. Minor support
1. Explanation, detail, example
2. Explanation, detail, example

Source: Brandon, Lee. Brandon, Kelly. Paragraphs and Essays