Lessons to Develop a Writer's Toolkit
Dr. Stuart Blythe
Department of English & Linguistics
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Welcome to the Writer's Toolkit. On these pages you'll find lessons designed for anyone who must write clear and efficient prose on the job. Although the lessons were designed originally for students in my technical and advanced writing classes, I welcome any others who may have come across these pages.
The lessons appear to the right. On this page, I explain why the lessons were created and describe assumptions that guided their development. After reading this page, you should understand
- why the lessons refer to a writer's "toolkit"
- why language may be thought of as "modular"
Why Talk about a "Writer's Toolkit"?
When we talk about writing at work, we're talking about using one of humanity's oldest tools--language--to accomplish specific goals. Just as a carpenter uses a hammer and saw to build cabinets, or a surgeon uses various instruments to remove a tumor, or a tool & die maker uses a CNC lathe to produce precision parts, so does a writer use language to do such things as report information, request resources, and record specific events.
Consider one example: What if your organization wanted to win a contract to build a new roadway? And what if the agency with the power to award that contract had asked for written proposals from any organization wanting to bid on the project? You and your colleagues would have to use written language (i.e., a proposal) to show members of the agency what you would do and to persuade them that you would do a good job.
What These Lessons are Designed to Do
The purpose of the Writer's Toolkit is to help you work more carefully and ably with a tool that you already know a lot about--i.e., written language. More specifically, the exercises are designed to strengthen your ability to manipulate some common building blocks of language--especially words, phrases, clauses, paragraphs, and a few types of punctuation--in order to become a stronger writer.
These lessons are by no means exhaustive. Entire books have been devoted to issues of grammar and style, as is suggested by the titles listed on the Selected Readings page. These lessons were designed to supplement work in writing classes where students have time only to focus on a few essential guidlines for style and clarity.
Putting The Lessons in Context:
The Building Blocks of LanguageLanguage is modular. Writers and speakers assemble smaller units into larger ones, and they arrange those units in various ways. The most basic unit (for our purposes) is the phoneme, which is a unit of sound such as the sh sound in such words as shale, fish, and Chicago. As the previous sentence illustrates, we group phonemes together to make words. Likewise, we group words together to make clauses and phrases; we group clauses and phrases together to make paragraphs; etc.
Although writers and speakers use many similar building blocks, written and spoken communication each have unique features. Writers have a set of tools that speakers lack: punctuation and paragraphs. Speakers don't need punctuation or paragraphs because they use things such as pauses, tone of voice, and eye contact to communicate.
The point of these lessons is to help you work with various units of language and to use a few basic punctuation and paragraph strategies.
Contact Me with Your Questions
Be sure to contact me at blythes@ipfw.edu or 260-481-6770 with your questions and comments.
last updated: 2003.12.22
originally created: 2000.12.17
© Stuart Blythe | blythes@ipfw.edu
