Rules for Writers Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 1 discusses the writing process. It starts out by discussing ways to generate ideas for your writing assignment. For generating ideas, Diana Hacker says that you should start by assessing your writing situation. This means that you look at all of the aspects of your writing assignment. You need to locate the key elements of your writing assignment, which includes the subject of the assignment, sources of information that are available to you, the purpose of your assignment, the audience, and any constraints that the assignment has, such as length etc.

There are different ways to generate ideas. One way is to use a freewrite. You can also just talk to yourself or friends about the subject of your assignment. If your assignment is based on a reading, you can annotate the text and take notes. Write down questions that come into your head as you read. Then reread the text and try to answer the questions you had written. You can make a list of things that pertain to the subject of your assignment. You could use a technique called clustering. This means that you are showing relationships between the different ideas you have for your topic.

I plan to use the techniques in this chapter for my future writing assignments. I plan on doing a couple freewrites for each essay. I am also going to play with the technique of listing and clustering. I am also going to try to first write an informal outline after I generate some ideas.