Informative Writing

Using Focus and Form to Create a Fresh Approach

Key Features of Reports/Profiles

• Tightly focused topic

• Accurate, well-researched information

• Informative, but surprising thesis

• Various writing strategies

• Clear definitions

• Appropriate design

• Interesting or unusual Subject

• Necessary background

• Interesting angle

• Firsthand account

• Engaging details

• Narrative description or interview format

Focus is Key!• Tightly

focused topic

Don’t choose a topic and just write ALL YOU KNOW about the topic—that’s not focus!

• Interesting or unusual subject

(and that would be an

F)

Take an Interesting Angle

“Writing Home: High Street”

• specific, concrete, engaging details

• words with strong connotations

“Georgia O’Keefe”

• Tightly focused

• Sense of context—”the men”

• Accompanying visual

• Didion’s daughter

Profiles

• Dominant impression• Quotations—if a person• Pictures—if a place• Additional research• Details that support the

angle• Make it have a POINT!

What are you saying about the person or place?

Concept, New Drug, or a Food

• Detail• Examples• Use of various

organizational patterns:– defining– classifying– dividing– comparing– explaining a process– analyzing causes or effects

Don’t forget format--Try a magazine article look

(but don’t forsake content over style)

Ways to Generate Detail for Your Topic

• comes from field of physics

Applied to writing:1) static view2) dynamic view3) relative view

Static View of Your Subject

• like a snapshot view

descriptionsdetailsfrozen in time/space

Dynamic View

• change over time

different seasonsdifferent times of daywhat happens in space of a

certain timehow something’s changedwhat happens—chronolog.

order

Relative View

• Classified in a category• Divided into parts• Compared with like things• Compared with unlike

things (analogy)• Things associated with it

Next class time:

• Generate pages of details, even a rough draft if possible on your topic

Consider writing an essay on the topic that is due on Tuesday for the Common Hour, if you plan to enter contest.

The question again:Essay Question:The author of My Freshman Year claims that one of the most

important things she discovered in her freshman year that made a difference from the professors was “compassion.” However, she also found that some of the best courses to take in college were “hard but not boring,” and “not easy but worth it.” How does a professor balance compassion with rigor in a course, reasonableness with challenges, and maintain appropriate, mentor-like relationships with students without babying or psychoanalyzing them at one extreme or remaining aloof from them at the other extreme? Your essay may contain advice for professors on how to be more rigorous while still being compassionate, it may address issues related to this delicate balance, like the problems with sites like RateMyProfessors, or may describe the kind of professor or course you hope to encounter (or have encountered) here at Edinboro University of PA. Do not mention actual professors’ names, but do use specific details from your own life and references from My Freshman Year in your essay.

Thanks for listening!

On Monday, I will ask you a two-question quiz and, if you listened to this podcast, you will be able to answer the questions correctly.