• As you write, keep your purpose in mind.
• When reporting, concentrate on accuracy.
• When explaining, concentrate on clarity.
• When persuading, remember that you must appeal to both reason and emotion.

• Visualize your reader before you start writing.
• When you are not sure who your audience is, write for someone informed, interested, respectful, skeptical, and liable to be disconcerted by errors.
• Ask yourself how much background your reader needs.
• Decide what details will appeal to that particular audience.
• As you write, stop occasionally to think about your reader.

• There is nothing about which you have nothing to say; you only need to find a way to care about a subject.
• Keep an open mind about all the techniques of invention: brainstorming, free-writing, clustering, designing a topic tree, directed questioning, and using a journal.
• Remember that one technique may be effective for one kind of task, another for another kind.

• Narrow your subject to a manageable size.
• In papers that support an opinion, devise a sharp and clear argumentative thesis.
• Ask yourself, Is my thesis too factual? too emotional? grandiose? trite?
• Have you made your thesis interesting by answering how? or why? or under what circumstances?
• Are the terms of your thesis succinct and clear?
• In your thesis, avoid phrases such as I think or I feel.
• For reports or summaries, be sure you have a good organizational thesis.

• Look in your background material and your invention notes for evidence and ideas that need developing.
• Identify your main ideas and place supporting ideas under them.
• Select a congenial method of organization: a summary paragraph, an informal outline, or a formal outline.
• Think doubt the organic progression of your major ideas; avoid stacking ideas.
• While drafting, bear in mind your purpose, your audience, and the big picture.
• Use the invention techniques to develop points.
• Remember that few writers can write and edit at the same time.
• Treat your first draft as temporary, subject to drastic change.

• Set aside time to revise your first drafts.
• Develop critical distance: separate yourself from your work.
• read your first draft aloud or ask someone else to read it to you.
• don't edit in a straight line; blow your essay to pieces.
• Start by revising large elements; move to small elements later.
• Stay flexible: be ready to change anything at any time for any good reason.

• Follow the nine steps when writing about reading: map, read and take notes, reread and take more notes, ask the eight question, form a thesis, plan your essay, select evidence from the text, draft, and revise.
• Let the organization of your argument take priority over that of the text.
• When writing an analytical essay, take especial care to write clearly and precisely.

• When examining what experts say, distinguish facts from informed opinions and speculation.
• Be careful when using statistics: they can be dangerous.
• Use examples to clarify meaning, demonstrate a point, or entertain your reader.
• Use personal experience sparingly; it is most effective in introductions and conclusions and as support for points you have demonstrated already with other kinds of evidence.
• Remember that although they can clarify a point, analogies cannot prove anything by themselves.
• Use known facts and shared beliefs to highlight a point.
• Remember that reasoning can provide powerful evidence.
• Be sure the evidence you use exhibits relevance, representativeness, accuracy, detail, and adequacy.
• Present your evidence accurately.

• Make your claims clear and unambiguous.
• Be sure you have sufficient evidence to support all parts of your claim.
• When the connection between the claim and the evidence is unclear or complicated, provide the warrant.
• If a connection seems weak, supplement it with backing.
• Anticipate the opposing idea is too strong to be denied, concede the point and qualify your argument accordingly.
• Use the elements of the Toulmin model as powerful revision tools.
• Don't forget that emotional appeals, when used appropriately, are potent, too.

• Be sure each of your paragraphs has a single main point.
• Remember that all ideas must relate to that main point.
• Delete any sentences not relate to the main point, no matter how clever or intriguing.
• Think about using a topic sentence to express the main point.
• Putting the topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph can help you stay on course.
• When you place the topic sentence in the middle, be sure it combines both ends of the paragraph into a single idea.
• When you place the topic sentence at the end, be sure all sentences lead to it.
• Remember that every main point, whether expressed in a topic sentence or implied, should relate to the essay's thesis.
• When revising for unity, read your paragraphs both in order and out of order.

• Prefer well-developed paragraphs to skinny paragraphs.
• End your paragraphs with a sense of closure; don't leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks.
• Keep your purpose in mind when selecting a strategy; let your point drive your development.
• Tips for Description
  
  • Use details that are vivid enough to call up an image in the reader's mind.
  • Make sure there is a point to the description.
• Tips for Narration
  
  • Decide what point your narrative should have.
  • Show, don't tell, developing your narrative scene by scene.
• Tips for Illustration
  
  • When providing illustrations, follow the same pattern as the idea the illustrations support, and offer enough detail and explanation so your reader will find them easily understandable.
• Tips for Process Analysis
  
  • Group elements into major components, include only essential details, and occasionally point out where you are in the process.
• Tips for Cause and Effect
  
  • Distinguish between significant causes and incidental ones, and resist the temptation to look for an only cause or single effect.
  • Differentiate between the remote causes and the proximate causes, and let purpose determine how far back to go in the causal chain.
• Tips for Division and Classification
  
  • Choose a significant principle of classification and stick to it, making sure that your categories are mutually exclusive, all the categories are described in the same fashion, and all the individual items fit into your categories.
• Tips for Comparison and Contrast
  
  • Follow a consistent pattern throughout, either attribute by attribute or item by item, providing the same kind of information in the same order.
• Tips for Definition
  
  • Use the dictionary, but go beyond it to examine crucial, debatable, or controversial terms.
  • Use the other strategies to help you define.
• Tips for Coherence
  
  • Remember that few considerations are as important as how you get from one idea to the next.
  • finish one idea before you take up another so that you won't have to double back.
  • Check to be sure you have adequately emphasized important Sentences you want to emphasize should come at the beginning or the end of the paragraph.
  • Be sure your reader doesn't have to jump too far between steps in the paragraph.
  • Check your sentences for something old, something new.
  • Be both sparing and accurate with transitional words; make sure you earn your therfores and moreovers.

• If a particular strategy occurs to you, go with it.
• Question your main points to decide on the appropriate strategy or strategies for developing those points.

• Make sure each paragraph is bonded fore and aft.
• Remember that the best transition is a logical progression.
• Consider the following method when linking paragraphs: chronology, repeating words or ideas, examples, summary, questioning the previous paragraph, transitional words, and personal and relative pronouns.

• Develop the body of your essay by means of throughlines that bind groups of paragraphs.
• Choose throughlines the same way you choose strategies.

• Remember that the goals of a beginning are to get the reader's attention, to identify the central issue, and to create the tone, make your first paragraph as inviting as you can.
• Remember your first sentence is perhaps the most important in your essay.
• Don't dawdle – get started.
• Choose the form that suits your subject and your style. A funnel is a good way to begin, but it is not the only way.
• Avoid obvious definitions, well-known facts platitudes, apologies, and excuses.

• Pay as much attention to your closing as to your opening.
• Keep in mind the three goals of an essay's conclusion: to make one last effort to convince the reader, to suggest larger implications than you could reasonably assert before you presented your evidence, to provide a satisfying sense of closure.
• Avoid the wastebasket ending, the fade-out, the wild surmise, and the mirror-image closing.

• Choose a title that is inviting and appealing.
• In devising a title, think about both the content and the tone of your essay.
• You can find a title in your essay, in the work or subject you are discussing, in literature, or even in popular saying.

• Use carefully chosen modifiers to sharpen or enrich your thought.
• Place modifiers as close as possible to the part of the spine they modify.
• Show restraint: use only as many modifiers as the spine can easily carry and the reader's mind take in.

• Remember that too many simple sentences may sound childish.
• When two thoughts are equal and reinforce each other, coordinate them in a single sentence.
• Use subordination to convey the relative importance of thoughts.
• Put main thoughts in independent clauses and subordinate thoughts in dependent clauses.

• Remember that the place of greatest emphasis is the end of the sentence. The second most emphatic position is the beginning.
• When you express more than one important thought, put them in parallel grammatical form.
• Balance elements in a sentence to emphasize the equality of the thoughts.
• Correlative conjunctions tie thoughts together, but when you use one of the pair, you must use the other. Be sure the thoughts are expressed in the same grammatical form.

• Look for blah phrases and cut them out of your prose.
• Remove, delete, and get rid of redundancies, repetitions, and instances of saying the same thing twice.
• Beware of overusing expletive openers.
• remember that the complexity of a sentence should be determined by the complexity of the thought.
• When you can shorten and simplify without distorting meaning, do it.
• Look for which clauses when you are searching for excess.

• Prefer the active voice to the passive.
• Seek vigorous, fresh verbs, and avoid tired, general ones.
• Don't overuse forms of to be.
• Put people in any sentences in which they can fit.
• Avoid disclaimers, weak-hearted negatives, and euphemisms.

• Know the difference between what a word denotes and the connotation it carries.
• Handle overloaded words with care.
• Define your terms to avoid confusing or misleading your reader.
• Use your dictionary for preferred pronunciation, meanings, syllabication, synonyms, antonyms, and derivation.
• Resort to a thesaurus with a critical eye and consult it along with – not in place of – your dictionary. Never use a thesaurus merely to avoid repetition or to inflate your prose.

Some writers are afraid of repeating a word, so they run to thesaurus for a synonym. Or they fear that their vocabulary doesn't sound intelligent enough, and the next time policeman pops up in an essay on crime prevention, it appears as constable or minion of the law. Imagine a lover letter:

 Dear Laura,
    I have been sitting next to you all day and just can't believe how
    pretty your are. Your voice is like music, and your eyes are like
    moonlight. I know that beauty isn't skin-deep, for I saw you
    laughing at our teacher, which shows good sense. I think we could
    get on well together. Let me know what you think. 
                                                      Love,
                                                      Name Withheld

Fearing that laura would find his note unexciting, the writer scurried to his thesaurus. There, of course, he found all sorts of replacements for his plain words. The trouble was, the resulting stew of mismatched words would have sent even the most receptive Laura into paroxysms of laughter.

   Dear Laura, 
      I have been straddling you daily and simply cannot fathom how
      comely you are. Your vociferation approximates a sonata, and
      your peepers resemble lunar illumination. I comprehend that
      pulchritude isn't subcutaneous, for I ogled you sniggering at
      our pedagogue, which illustrates beneficent cranial capacity. I
      formulate in my mind that we would have a positive response to
      each other. Inform me of what you reason about. 
                                                         Charity,
                                                         Name Withheld

• Be as concrete and specific as you can.
• Watch out for vague, timid, and loud qualifiers.
• Prefer short, slim words to long, fat ones.
• Avoid jargon; strive to write so that any literate person can follow your thought.
• Get rid of cliches.
• Keep slang out of your writing.
• Avoid sexist language.

• Think about the qualities and techniques that make a style clear, appropriate, and interesting.
• To learn how to develop a good style, observe and imitate what good writers do.
• Consider the reader.

• Remember that words convey values and feelings as well as thoughts.
• Keep in mind that your style is the you hat you present to your reader.

• Read your work critically so that you can evaluate whether your tone is the one you want to convey.
• Avoid flippancy, sarcasm, sentimentality, self-righteousness, belligerence, and apology.

• Take some risks with your writing.
• Write to appeal to your reader's senses; make pictures as vivid as possible.
• Try for an occasional simile, metaphor, or analogy.
• Be a little adventurous: invert the natural order and try an occasional fragment.
• Change your pace by mixing up constructions, sentence length, and placement of emphasis.

• Seek a mixture of respect, seriousness, and informality in your style.
• A persuasive style appeals to the senses and emotions as well as to the intellect.