This handbook is a means to an end: improvement in
writing college research papers. But it is not the only, or the most
important, means, for only you can improve your writing. A handbook, a
dictionary or grammar guide, instructions from a professor, or contact with
good books - all these are secondary to you.
You make the choice of words and paragraphs; often you
raise the questions; sometimes you find the answers. When the words work, the
questions provoke and answers illuminate, then you get the credit. You'll have
discovered authority in your writing, the word which derives from author.
At college you have a chance to make that discovery.
Here you'll be writing college research papers with differing styles,
requirements and degrees of difficulty. Sometimes you will make a mess, or say
something you don't mean, as Mayor Daley did at the 1968 Democratic Convention
in Chicago:
"The police are not here to create disorder. They
are here to preserve disorder."
When your writing goes wrong, it will seem not only to
create disorder but also to preserve it. At such moments this handbook might
prove useful, showing you ways to organize and rewrite college research
papers, which can help you rescue order from chaos. But simply reading it and
following its suggestions will not help you be a good writer. This handbook is
not a How To Be Your Own Best Friend of writing college research
papers, because you will not learn "how to" in isolation. The
learning you will do here at Amherst will ask you to connect, to make
relationships in your head.
Your words on the page are signs of those relationships
with other people, tests, facts, authorities, historical events, chemical
reactions, biological processes, theories, dreams, and most important, your
own ideas. If your writing works, it will show that the relationships can give
pleasure and bear fruit. You need not be an "expert" writer to have
that happen. Simply believe that words have reasons for being, that they are
alive.
What
Is A Good Writer?
A
Good Writer Thinks
A
Good Writer Takes Time
A
Good Writer Revises
