ABSTRACT
Prewriting-in both the amount I do and the strategies I use-depends on the kind of writing I’m doing. I begin essays by writing streams of consciousness notes. I start with obvious quotations, or a rehashing of class discussions and free-associates. I connect these with arrows, or asterisks, and continue writing about how or why these two ideas connect.… These notes aren’t in full sentences, and end up looking like an annotated road map. (Evans, cited in Murray, 2001, pp. 148-149)
One piece of advice commonly given to writers is to outline a project before they begin working on it. That’s not bad advice, though it oversimplifies the relation of thought to language. Because many of us do our thinking and writing simultaneously-unable to know what we think until we see what we say-outlining is not always a reasonable option. (Rankin, 2001, p. 22)
We stated in the preface that one of our most important goals for authoring this book is to help you become a better writer. Therefore, in this chapter, we move forward into invention-what writing scholars and teachers refer to as the first step in the composing process. Donald Murray (2001) says invention is anything a writer does before beginning a draft.
