English 1301
The Benefits of Prewriting (Constructing an Outline)
Dr. James Wright
Below are a few steps you can take to put yourself in position to craft engaging and compelling essays. These steps
are meant to help you move deliberately through the drafting process (from the moment you start thinking about
potential approaches to a writing assignment to the moment you apply your final piece of punctuation to your final
draft). Start with a seven-to-ten minute freewriting (LBH 21-22) session on the topic. Freewriting is a prewriting
technique that has a twofold purpose: 1) to help you identify what you might know or feel about a topic; 2) to
encourage you to get some ideas down on paper. In a composition class, especially a class with a compressed
schedule such as ours, the last thing a writer wants to do is put off working on a writing project until the last
minute. Freewriting allows you, in a very short period of time (most freewriting sessions are between seven and ten
minutes long) and through a casual process, to start moving forward on a project. Such a strategy alone can
determine not only whether a student crafts an effective essay, but also whether a student puts her- or himself in
position to complete an essay. After you have generated some preliminary thoughts through freewriting, circle the
ideas that seem to have the most promise for your essay. After identifying a singular idea that you might want to
develop your essay around, construct a working thesis (27-32) and an outline (34-39) for the essay, start to identify
usable ideas/passages from secondary sources (607-625), if the essay has such a requirement, and generate a
working title (53). Below you will find specific information and examples about how to meet these prewriting
strategies (the following material was generated in response to the fourth prompt for essay 1).
Working Thesis (don‟t fret too much if your early efforts at constructing a thesis are less than successful. Your
thesis will become more definitive and compelling, much like your essay, as you become more and more
comfortable and familiar with the content of the essay. Ultimately, it is always a good idea to allow your thesis to
develop organically, to become more refined as you advance through the writing process. In fact, if a later draft of
your thesis doesn‟t really resemble an early draft, take that transformation as a good sign that you are moving
toward the creation of a cohesive, unified, and well-developed essay):
Example of a working thesis: The ideological training (explicit and implicit) of a child by the family leads not
only a clear sense of self, but also to a murky understanding of others; not only to a devotion to a specific code
of conduct, but also to the rejection of social difference.
This working thesis stands to benefit from deeper specificity and precision, but as a draft it lays out the cultivatable
focus of the essay.
Informal Outline (of the three outlines covered in LBH, this one provides the most flexibility for the early stages
of writing):
Promotes a sense of belonging
Early creation of a source of community (perhaps I can use definition here to help the audience understand
what I mean by community and how is leads to the creation of individual identity)
Development of self-consciousness within the family dynamic
Shaping of the social performance of self/identity
Refinement of the comfort of belonging (anecdote about my Uncle Joe‟s words of
of advice to me after a bully took my lunch money in the 3rd grade)
Encourages orthodox thinking
Production of narrow awareness of social difference (cause and effect)
Encouragement of various types of loyalty
Announcement of expectations—linguistic, political, class, etc.
Fails to facilitate personal growth
Promotion of limitations as categorical and therefore honorable
Expectation of constant connection (analogy of infant and mother and notions of
sustenance)
Admonishment of movement away from familial practices and attitudes (comparison and
contrast)
Needs to be balanced against other forces (internal and external) that shape identity
Assertion of acknowledgement and acceptance of other ways of functioning (anecdote about
the freedom and pain associated with openly transgressing an important family convention)
Combining of practices and experiences in the development of individual identity
Of course not all of this information will find its way into a three-to-four page essay. But by identifying up front as
much material as you can (and ways in which to develop that material [examples and the patterns of development
you might use to cover/elaborate on such examples]), you put yourself in position to have a multitude of choices
for material and writing strategies when you enter the drafting process. Needless to say, it is far better to start the
drafting process with too many ideas and writing strategies than too few. The former allows you to carefully and
judiciously choose both what will appear in your essay and how it will be used to engage the audience; the latter puts
you in the desperate position of hoping that what comes to mind during a truncated and rushed journey through the
drafting process will somehow, someway effectively reach an audience (generally, as with most acts of
procrastination, this will not be the case).
Possible Source Material (look closely at potential sources and identify all promising ideas/citations):
Dorothy Allison, “What Did You Expect?”
“Who I think I should be and who I am are still not quite the same, though I try to behave as if that is not so. I
show up wherever I can with my mother‟s smile but without the makeup she so carefully applied . . .” (594). How I
might be able to use the passage: perhaps connect to the residual effects of family attachments; perhaps use to
show how a hybrid identity can be born out of simultaneous acceptance and rejection of family
history/background.
“The man behind the polished mahogany desk frowned at me. „I‟m afraid we have no vacancies,‟ he told me
sternly.” This passage could work to demonstrate the difficulties of escaping the consequences of the common
alignment of social class and familial upbringing. This passage might also work as an example of aspects of family
background that remain attached to identity regardless of intentions and desires.
Richard Rodriguez, “The Chinese in All of Us”
“It falls to the son to say, America exists, Papa. There is an unresolved tension between the „I‟ and the „we.‟ We
trust most the „I,‟ though grudgingly we admit the necessity of „we.‟” This passage seems to function as a metaphor
for the complexity built into the position I‟m trying to argue. There is a natural but necessary anxiety in replacing
familial identity with individual identity.
“There is a sad story in America about „making it.‟ It is the story of summer vacations. Of no longer being able to
speak to one‟s parents. Of having your Chinese father mock your American ways.” This quote speaks directly to
the myriad losses and gains connected to the effort of locating and announcing an individual identity inside the
parameters (as pleasant and generative as they might be) of family.
Of course you want to identify and provide preliminary critical commentary on numerous secondary source
passages/citations. After you have identified a number of promising sources, you can narrow down the possibilities
to those that most directly fit the direction/substance of your essay.
Working Titles (although it is commonly suggested that the creation of a title should be left for the end of the
drafting process, there are benefits to playing around with possible titles in the early stages of drafting. Since titles
are meant to distill the essence of an essay for an audience, by forcing yourself to think about possible titles in the
early stages of drafting, you are simultaneously forcing yourself to develop a clear and sharp focus for the piece.
The earlier you identify a specific focus for your essay, the better equipped you will be at identifying and sustaining
the goals of the essay.)
You Can Never Go Home Again: The Inevitable Drive toward Individuality
The Difficult Balance between Familial Demands and Individual Desires
Mother‟s Milk: Honoring Family and Finding Yourself
Dinner-Table Talk: How Family Shapes Individual Identity
Going Straight to Your Room . . . and Crawling out the Window
Going Straight to Your Room (and Crawling out the Window)