by Mouhcine Azizoun

Created on: July 23, 2009   Last Updated: March 06, 2010

Writing is one of the toughest hurdles to overcome. Most learners face insurmountable difficulties when writing. It is obvious that no one can teach you how to write. However, teaching you how to organize your writing is within the realms of possibility.  By learning how to write a good paragraph, you will know how to write a good article or essay.  There are three stages you need to go through: brainstorming ideas, selecting relevant ones, and organizing them into a meaningful whole.

Brainstorming Ideas

At this point, you should read the topic question and understand it well.  Then jot down some ideas.  Do not try to think about whether they are correct or relevant.  All you have to do is writing down anything that comes to your mind about the topic.  Do not write full sentence and do not care about grammar.  Write some key words or notes.  Once you have come up with enough ideas, you need to go to the second stage.

Selecting Relevant Ideas

The time is nigh for you now to go through your ideas and select the relevant ones.   By relevant I meant the ideas that are to the point and the ones that do not stray far from the topic you want to write about.  Read them one by one while relating them to your topic question to check relevancy. Then try to form some short sentences.

 If your topic is about “how will foreign languages help students in their future careers?”, then a sentence like: “teachers will be proud of the students” is not relevant.  Whether teachers are proud not, this has nothing to do with future careers.  Once you have come up with relevant short sentences, you are ready for the third stage.

Organizing Ideas

At this juncture, you first need to examine your ideas and find some common things they have.  For example, these two ideas: “foreign languages will help them excel in their jobs” and “foreign languages will help them get more job opportunities” are both about the professional benefits of foreign languages.  That’s a common thing these two sentences have. 

This common thing will be very helpful while forming your topic sentence.  The latter tells the reader what your paragraph is about.  So if you manage to find the common thing that all of your ideas share, you can use it in the topic sentence.  The example of the topic question we used earlier has only one main idea, which is about future careers of the students.  But if it were like this: “how will foreign languages help students in their future life and careers?” then you have two main ideas.  One is about future careers and the other is about life in general.

For such a question, the topic sentence could be something like: “studying foreign languages will help students personally and professionally”.  Notice the last two words.  They are the common things between the ideas.

Once you have come up with the common things, all you have to do is write the topic sentence and the other ideas you came up with before.  You can choose which idea will be first and which one is last.  But one thing to bear in mind, is that if you write “… students personally and professionally” you will have to write ideas about the personal side first and then the professional one.   This way your paragraph will be well-organized.

Following the aforementioned steps will certainly help you organize your writing and make it better in the process.  You will also avoid the difficulties you face when writing the traditional way.  Make sure you follow the above steps in order to improve your writing.

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