Many students have difficulties in the early stages of writing because they think that everything that turns into the paper must look like the paper, just as everything that Miss T. eats turns into Miss T. Head down, scribbling furiously, the student never looks back, as Coleridge says, "for fear a frightful fiend may close behind him tread." 

The result of this "don't look back" approach (distinguished from free rough-writing by its level of high anxiety) is a tight-looking series of pages, with paragraphs all bunched up (if there are paragraphs), no margins, microscopic inserts tucked wherever possible, and warnings like GO HERE NEXT and TURN BACK all over the place.

This tense writing often happens when a student has a lot of material to cover or a series of questions to ask, each with a subordinate topic. Anxious to do justice to the reading, the writer re-reads his notes, spot-checks the material, and thinks he's ready to go. But as he writes he finds he must look up quotes again and again, sometimes losing track or changing direction in mid-draft. In fact, the student knows the material and has good ideas, but he seems to have too many ideas at once.

In this situation, the blank wall which faces him might help. To put the material where he can easily refer to it, where it will, as they used to say, "have its own space" and not crowd to desk, he might make a list of points for each major category in the paper. Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes might serve him better if he nailed them to the wall, each with a list of nifty quotes and page references. 

Using different-colored paper (not navy blue or black!) for each category may help him see the way to clear, coherent drafting. Placing the lists beside each other encourages comparative thinking--something which is tricky to do when the writer has to flip back and forth or hunt down Plato in a wilderness of dense scribbling.

For papers which require some knowledge of chronological events or reactions happening in a sequence, the blank wall might help again. Tacking up a piece of shelf paper (not contact paper!) and drawing a horizontal line, the writer marks points of development to consider before starting to write.

Example: How does the public reaction to Darwin's The Origin of Species reflect the conflicts of Victorian society? Knowing what other scientific discoveries were being made around 1859, what was the national literacy rate in England, whether church attendance was falling, what were the popular theories of criminal behavior, might help the writer engage more imaginatively with the question, even if all these facts aren't directly relevant.

   Using The Paper Topic
   Rough Magic
   Grocery Lists
   Up Against The Wall
   Paragraph Outline
   Building On Evidence
   Traditional Outlines
   Starting With Last Paragraph