Appendix III

Checklist: Elements of Composition

Purpose: Central Idea, Thesis

State your purpose clearly.

• Choose a subject you care about.
• Provide sufficient background and context to make your subject understandable.
• Connect subordinate ideas or secondary arguments to your main purpose or central idea.
• Select a mode of discourse that suits your purpose and audience:
  • Use description to provide information about a person, setting, scene, or object.
  • Use narration (including anecdote) to tell a story.
  • Use exposition to inform your reader.
  • Use persuasion to induce your reader to think, act, or feel a certain way.
• Analyze your audience, using four questions from Mary Munter:
  • Who are they?
  • What do they know?
  • What do they feel?
  • How can you motivate them?

Point Of View: Tone, Attitude, and Humor

Establish your relationship with your material and your reader.

• Maintain a consistent point of view.
• Maintain a consistent level of formality.
• Use a personal tone in most correspondence.
• In narrative writing:
  • Use a limited point of view to create intrigue.
  • Use a subjective point of view to heighten drama.
  • Use a limited point of view to create humor and irony.
  • Use contrasting points of view to add interest.
  • Use a persona for effect.
• For persuasive writing:
  • Adopt a reasonable tone.
  • Know when to hedge and when to insist.
  • Use the you viewpoint to involve your reader.
  • Use anecdotes to create sympathy for your perspective.
• Use disparity to create humor and irony.

Organization: Arrangement

Plan and organize your material.

• Use an outline to help you think and plan.
• Use the three-part paragraph to help you organize your thoughts.
• For persuasive writing:
  • Take a direct approach when writing to a sympathetic audience.
  • Take an indirect approach when writing to an unsympathetic or hostile audience.
  • Take an indirect approach when delivering bad news.
  • Adapt the standard five-part argument to your purpose and audience.
  • Acknowledge the opposition to strengthen your argument.
  • Recognize your reader and offer to take the next step in correspondence.
• Pay particular attention to introductions and conclusions.
• Make the first and last sentences the strongest parts of your paragraph.
• Use your lead to engage your reader.
• Conclude conclusively.

Support: Selection of Detail

Support your assertions.

• Offer specific, relevant details.
• Offer enough—but not too much—detail.
• Appeal to the senses with concrete, colorful detail.
• Appeal to logic with facts and statistics.
• Use anecdotes to make your point.
• Use analogy and metaphor to explain your thinking.
• Quote others to enhance your credibility.
• Document your sources.
• For persuasive writing:
  • Use a combination of rhetorical appeals.
  • Avoid common fallacies in persuasive writing.
  • Follow standard rules of evidence.

Coherence: Connections and Flow

Connect your thoughts.

• Use an organizational statement to tell your reader where you’re going.
• Use transitional words and phrases.
• Repeat key words and phrases.
• Use parallel structure to bind with rhythm.
• Maintain a consistent string of topics.
• For continuity from one sentence to another:
  • Start with old information.
  • End with new information.
  • End with what you intend to develop next.
  • Use “it shifts” and inversions to move new information to the right.
  • Use the passive voice to move old information to the left.
• For continuity within sentences:
  • Keep adjective phrases together.
  • Help your reader keep track of subjects and verbs.
  • Avoid unnecessary shifts in subject, modified subject, person, voice, and tense.
  • Arrange your material according to natural progressions.