Mcom 320: Drafting Your Projects

Lesson Overview

Drafting documents is like building a LEGO model. You gather, evaluate, and organize the pieces before you start assembling your first model. You start putting pieces together, even if they don't fit perfectly. In writing, compose your first draft—but do not worry about perfection; just express your ideas. You will revise later.

The first draft of any document is the beginning of the assembly process and your building blocks are the words, sentences, and paragraphs. This lesson teaches you to follow the basic rules of paragraph development, style, and tone, to create clear, concise, concrete logical documents.

Consider how Nephi taught his audiences:

"My soul delighteth in plainness unto my people, that they may learn.” (2 Ne. 25:4)

Worry less about impressing your audiences and more about expressing ideas in plain terms your audience can understand. In misguided attempts to appear knowledgeable, some business writers try to impress their audiences by using jargon, buzzwords, and complex structures. But trying to impress is like building a dazzling LEGO model with no clear purpose.

Business writers who express use straightforward language. Instead of using intangible, abstract concepts, they use engaging concrete details instead of abstract ideas.

Think of concrete writing in terms of the ladder of abstraction, whose rungs represent levels of abstraction between broad, intangible concepts and specific, concrete concepts.

At the bottom are words that evoke the audience's senses—words that describe objects the audience can see, hear, feel, taste, touch, and smell. Toward the middle of the ladder are words that mix concrete and abstract ideas—these words convey abstract concepts related to specific actions, e.g., honesty and telling the truth. At the top are purely abstract concepts that are intangible, e.g., success.

Read the following page and textbook chapter

Watch the following videos on Rhetoric