HOW TO DEVELOP IDEAS IN ACADEMIC WRITING

1. Developing Ideas
A person writing on paper. Writers need to have something to write about. In college, you’ll
be expected to provide your own observations and ideas. Even in a research paper on an
assigned topic, you’ll be expected to offer your own thinking about what your sources say.
The purpose of writing in college is to show your own analysis and thought processes on the
concepts that you’re learning about.
Writers develop ideas in many ways, including the following:
Journaling
Freewriting
Brainstorming
Mapping or diagramming
Listing
Asking defining questions
Noting Pros & Cons
You will find each of these options explained in more detail in the Prewriting Strategies
section. If you do not already have a strong prewriting process, you should try out several of
the strategies to see what works best for you.
2. Narrowing a Topic
A cherry blossom tree with a magnifying glass focusing on one blossom once you have
decided what you want to write about, you need to stop and consider if you have chosen a
feasible topic that meets the assignment’s purpose.
If you have chosen a very large topic for a research paper assignment, you need to create a
feasible focus that’s researchable. For example, you might write about something like the
Vietnam War, specifically the economic impact of the war on the U.S. economy.
If you have chosen a topic for a non-research assignment, you still need to narrow the focus
of the paper to something manageable that allows you to go in-depth in the writing. For
instance, you might have a goal of writing about the nursing profession but with a specific
focus on what the daily routine is like for a nurse at your local pediatric hospital.
The important thing is to think about your assignment requirements, including length
requirements, and make sure you have found a topic that is specific enough to be engaging
and interesting and will fit within the assignment requirements.
3. Gathering Information
It’s easier to gather information once you have a relatively narrow topic. A good analogy is
when you conduct a search in an online database. You’ll get thousands (if not more) entries
if you use the key words Vietnam War as opposed to fewer and more focused entries if you
use terms related to economic impact of the war on the U.S.
Or, if you’re analyzing The Great Gatsby, you’ll be able to gather more specific information
from the novel if you focus on a character, a theme, etc. instead of all elements of the novel
at once.

It may help to use the image of a hand fan in order to understand gathering information.
Think of your narrow topic as the end of the fan, the point at which all of the slats are linked
together. As you gather information about your narrow topic, the fan spreads out, but the
information is still all connected to the narrow topic.
4. Ordering & Drafting
Before you begin to draft, it can be helpful to create an outline to help you organize your
thoughts. You can refer to the prewriting if you have organized thoughts already using a
prewriting strategy, such as mapping. The important thing is to list out your main ideas,
including your thesis, to help you visualize where you are going with your essay. An outline
will also help you see before you begin drafting if your ideas will support your thesis.
The actual writing occurs after you have a focus and enough information to support that
focus. Drafting involves making choices about how much information to offer and what
information to put where. Your outline will be a guide, but you may find that you need to
revise the order once you begin drafting.
Consider the following points as you draft:
Is there enough information to provide evidence for your assertions? If not, circle back to
gathering information.
Is there a basic idea that needs to be offered first so that readers understand subsequent
ideas?
Are there related ideas that logically should be grouped together?
Are there some ideas that are more important than others and, if so, what is the best place
in the writing to emphasize those ideas?
Are there logical linkages between ideas, so readers don’t get lost moving from one idea to
the next?
Drafting consists of building the paragraphs of your writing and linking them together. And,
remember, the draft you create at this point is not your final draft. There are additional
steps of the writing process to consider before you are ready to submit your work.
5. Revising
A corrected paper on a table
Many students often try to lump revising and editing into one, but they are really two
separate activities. Revising is about your content while editing is about sentence-level
issues and typos. It’s important to remember to allow yourself time to complete both parts
of this process carefully.
Revision is about seeing your writing again. Revising is an important step in the writing
process, because it enables you to look at your writing more objectively, from a reader’s
view. Set your writing aside for a time. Then go back to it and work from big to small as you
ask and answer revising questions.
Basic Big Revision Questions—Ask These First:

Are there places that are not clear?
Are there places that need more information?
Are there places that need less information, because the information seems to diverge too
much from your main point?
Does some of the information need to be re-ordered in order to make sense to a reader
who may not have much background on this topic?
As you see, these basic revision questions concern themselves with the amount, clarity, and
order of information. That’s what the revision process is all about—making sure that your
concepts and supporting information are presented in the clearest, most logical way for
most readers to understand.
Once you deal with the big things (amount and order of information), then you can move to
the small things—the language, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Editing
Once you have your content the way you want it and have completed your revisions, it’s
time to think about editing your paper. When you edit, you are looking for issues with
sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc. And, when you edit, it’s
important to realize that it’s difficult to catch all of these errors in one editing pass. A
thorough editing process is one that involves several editing passes. Research on student
writing indicates that most of the errors in college essays are related to careless editing.
With that in mind, it’s important to take steps to ensure you are engaging in a good editing
process.
Questions to Consider When You Edit
Is the language clear and easy to read and understand? Are difficult terms defined?
Is the sentence structure clear and easy to understand?
Are the sentences grammatically correct?
Have I proofread and checked for typos and misspellings?
What errors might my spell checker and grammar checker have missed?