Organization and Clarity (Form)
Once you've got your bright idea and your examples tucked away, you have to consider the form of your writing. That includes sentences as well as paragraphs, and this is where an outline can be beneficial to make sure your writing makes sense. The goal here is clarity. How can you get your point across as clearly and effectively as possible? If you're writing a persuasive essay on why Hamlet is a total jerk in Shakespeare's play, for instance, you probably don't want to spend one long paragraph on Hamlet talking to his dad's ghost and then three sentences about why he hates his girlfriend. You want to build your essay from your lightest examples to your strongest so that you end on a high note. Moreover, the reader should be able to follow your arguments in a straight line from your thesis to your conclusion, hopefully learning something along the way.
Structure is important. The best writing has a unity of content and form, meaning that the structure of the piece reflects the arguments you're trying to make or the story you're trying to tell. For instance, a funny, sarcastic personal essay might use colloquial words and its fair share of personal examples, and thus have a loose sentence and paragraph structure - the 'Vegas Wedding' of unity and form. Your more traditional, formal papers will do best if their structure is relatively rigid, the word choice professional and considered, and the examples chronological, or at least sensibly ordered - the 'First Time Meeting Your Boyfriend's Parents,' in other words.
Your arguments should logically take the reader from the introduction to conclusion
The things I just said about word choice and sentence structure figure heavily into what the style and voice of your piece is like. Good writing, as you may have observed, almost always has a consistent and definable voice. In most essays that you'll be tasked with writing, that voice should be confident and authoritative because your job is to convince your reader that your analysis, argument, or interpretation is the correct one.
Your style and voice will be unique to you, but in general, you want to use active verbs whenever you can, avoid the passive voice except when necessary, vary your sentence length with short and long sentences (at your discretion), and don't be afraid to write like you speak - as long as you promise to edit like you read.
Let me elaborate on that a little. I've often had students tell me that they knew how they felt about a particular argument or concept, but they had trouble putting it on paper and making it sound the same as what they did when they told it to me. For instance, let's say an essay prompt asks you to take a position on whether or not you think grades are beneficial for students or if they do more harm than good. If we were having a conversation and I asked you what you thought about this, John T. Collegestudent might answer like this:
'I don't know. I hate having to worry about grades, especially with my parents. But... if we didn't have grades, how would we know whether I could advance to the next class or get my degree? I don't like them, but they might be necessary.'
As a person, a student, you have clear thoughts and opinions, but for some reason, sometimes these ideas get dropped on their way to the page. If you want your voice to come through - let it! But edit it to make it more formal and confident. So, that last statement might come out like this:
'Grades are a huge source of both personal and parental stress. But grades are also a necessary evil. Without them, how would we know who advances to the next class or who graduates?'
Some of the DNA of the original conversational style is there and so is all of the content. That's just one approach you might take as you develop your writing.
Lesson Objective
After watching this lesson, you should be able to determine what makes your writing 'good' based on content, form, style, and voice.