Writing Motivation: After You Start

I ’ m Mason from the OWL. If you are like most people and fall into The second group, then you ’ re in luck. This is the second article in our series on Writing When You ’ d, Rather Not Write In this article, I will offer strategies And words of encouragement that will hopefully get you if not fully pumped up at least On track for starting your writing assignment The first strategy, when you ’ re facing that Awful blank page is to break your writing task into manageable parts.

Do you think that I go into the gym and do All 50 of my 300-pound bench presses in one go. You may be surprised to learn that I actually Do not do that. Instead, I break my workout into smaller tasks. Similarly, thinking that you need to complete Your entire 20-page document right now will make starting seem much more daunting than it really Is I usually set myself small goals for each session and space my work over multiple days? This way I take my writing bit by bit So which manageable chunk.

Should you begin With I suggest, choosing any part of the text that You know you can write right now and starting there, It doesn. ’ t need to be the introduction. Either I recently started a paper by making the Works. Cited page, which might seem weird, but as I was working on it, I was struck with an Important idea about how I wanted to write the rest of my paper. Of course, it probably won’t work well to write a conclusion before you’ve written any other part of a paper, But still starting anywhere.

Is much better than not starting Here is another suggestion. Try a prewriting Technique There are a lot of prewriting techniques. And a good one is called a “ freewrite, ” which you can think of as stretching for writing. Just begin writing about your topic without Being critical of what you write, Don, ’ t worry about grammar and don. ’ t worry, If it sounds stupid or if you will even use any of the free write, Just write whatever comes to your mind, This may help loosen you up clarify your Thoughts and allow you to start your paper in a less intimidating way.

You may even get some useable content out. Of the orewrite, Lastly, remember that even the best writers Make terrible first drafts Thinking that the first version of a composition Will be good enough to use for a final draft is like thinking that without any training, You can run a four-minute mile In reality becoming a great runner or writer. Involves much more failure than that. So if your first draft is terrible, not only Is that okay, but it ’ s great! At that point, you ’ ve, taken the first difficult Step toward making something that could become excellent, So why are you still staring at a blank Word? Document It ’ s, time to get off the couch put on your Pink headband and go win a gold medal.