One of the hardest things to learn about college writing: separating out your ideas

Your average first-year student—but I’d wager almost everyone is like this—seems to hit a point in his writing process where he’s just had some inspiration about what he wants to say, but all the different ideas that make up that larger argument are so jumbled together in his head that it’s hard to take them apart and deal with them individually.

A lot of times, this ends up with the student putting way too much into a single paragraph, because he couldn’t quite tell where one idea ended and the next began—it all just flowed together in his head. In fact, this is such a powerful thing that often, when I ask a student (usually in writing center conferences) to run one of his points by me, he ends up telling me not just the point I asked about, but also what comes before it and what comes after it. If I don’t stop him, he usually keeps going through more or less his whole argument. That’s because—at least as far as I can tell—to him, the individual parts of his argument are much too connected to be talked about without filling in the surrounding context.

You can probably try this yourself: take an essay that you’re working on or have already written, and pick one paragraph. Try explaining just that paragraph to another person—nothing else, just that paragraph. Don’t even mention anything else within the essay.

You might find doing this somewhat hard. You might find yourself wanting to explain the context that leads up to that point, or what comes after it. It probably feels a bit wrong to talk about just one piece of what’s really a bigger puzzle.

Of course, it’s largely a good thing that you want to give the context. It indicates that you have a good grasp of how the ideas in your essay form a cohesive whole. The thing is, if you want to be able to think clearly about those ideas during the writing process, then you have to get to the point where you can separate each idea from the larger whole and examine it on its own. It’s not helpful if you can only think about everything all at once.

To speak metaphorically, it’s a bit like dealing with a ball of Play-Doh where all the colors have been mashed up together, and what you’re trying to do is separate out the colors from one another. Anyone who has ever attempted this knows it is no mean feat. It’s hard to find exactly where the green ends and the red begins, and you can’t pull on the blue part without bits of yellow coming with it, and whoever did this managed to get the purple Play-Doh to weave through the entire thing. Probably he rolled it into a snake, first.

In other words, pulling your essay apart into its component ideas is tricky on a cognitive level. Indeed, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the hardest things to learn about college writing, and I think there are two reasons it’s particularly difficult.

The first one, I’ve already touched on, at least implicitly. To put it directly, it’s hard to solve a problem you don’t know exists. For the student who runs through three major ideas in a single, giant paragraph, or the student in the writing center who can’t help but recite his entire argument when I’ve just asked him for a piece of it, the difficulty is that the writer isn’t even aware that separating out his ideas is something that needs to happen. It feels natural to string everything together, so the need to take each idea in turn never really registers in his thinking.

The second reason separating out your ideas is difficult is that it demands a lot of concentration—which is a problem because your concentration already has its hands full with, you know, every other part of writing an essay. And “every other part of writing an essay” is an enormous cognitive load, especially when you’re dealing with ideas as complex as the ones you’ll find in college writing—because, let’s be clear on this, college-level essay ideas are not simple ideas. “I want a sandwich” is a simple idea. Nothing you’re asked to write about in college is going to be simple; even if you’re comfortable dealing with the subject at hand, you’re still dedicating most or all of your concentration to a large cognitive burden when you’re actually in the process of thinking and writing.

Alright, so you’ve got two problems when it comes to separating out your ideas. First, it’s hard to notice that you need to do it, and second, actually doing it requires cognitive resources that are already bound up in other tasks. What can you do about all of this?  

Well, probably you can do a lot of things, but I’ll offer two possible…solutions? I only hesitate there because the solution to the first problem—that it’s hard to remember that you need to separate out your ideas—isn’t really a thing you can do, exactly. It’s more a mindset that I’m suggesting you try to take up. On the other hand, the solution to the second problem—that is, the problem of not having the cognitive resources available to separate out your ideas—is much more actionable. (It’s just part of my writing process.)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that these two solutions are the only options. I’m more hoping that, by going through them, I’ll be able to give you some sense of what kind of thing I’m trying to do in my own head when I’m wrestling with that big ball of mashed-up, abstract Play-Doh. (As a side note, if anyone’s looking for a band name: “Abstract Play-Doh.” You’re welcome.)

Okay, first up is how to deal with the problem of not knowing that you need to separate out your ideas.

You are now aware that you need to separate out your ideas. Well done.

…

Alright, here’s my real advice on this problem, because obviously just flat out telling you to remember this isn’t very helpful. That said, this piece of advice really does boil down to trying to remember something. Hopefully, though, it’s a bit more…well, memorable.

What I’m suggesting is this: that you try to remember that the connections that exist between your ideas are just as real as the ideas themselves. What I mean is that, when you’re writing an essay, you’re not just telling me stuff. You’re also telling me why you’re telling me what you’re telling me, and the why is just as real as the what.

Just to make the point more clearly, here are two versions of the same short argument, which is totally real and not at all something I made up on the spot:

Firstly, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Secondly, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Finally, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah.

That doesn’t actually tell me why those ideas are there. It just tells me that they’re there. Here’s the same (again, definitely real) argument with the logical connections actually articulated:

The most important thing to consider is that blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Because of this, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. That said, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah.

Even though you don’t know what the actual content of the argument is, the sentences in the second version probably felt carefully delineated. In fact, the first version doesn’t actually lay out an argument at all, because an argument doesn’t just consist of the individual points; it also consists of the connections between those points. You wouldn’t build a house by just stacking bricks on top of one another; you’d put in mortar, too. (It’s mortar, right? That’s what goes between bricks in a house? Look, I’m not an architect.)

On to the second problem—namely, mustering your concentration to separate out your ideas when you’re already weighed down by the cognitive load of every other part of the writing process. Here’s the solution I use: my current writing process. Bear with me for a bit.

The first thing I do to help myself untangle my ideas is to write out (by hand) everything I want to say, all in a rush. I figure if I’m at a point where my ideas are so jumbled together that I can’t take them apart inside of my head, I’ll put them onto paper where I can look at them outside of my head. After that, I’ll usually put away what I’ve written for a while (a day, if I have the time, or else just a few hours). When I come back, I’ll read the thing through just to get it into my head again, and then I’ll take a different colored pen and start bracketing things off according to the major ideas that I see.

I might begin at the top, start reading through and realize I see the first major idea that a bunch of sentences seem to be supporting. Okay, bracket off that bit of writing and label it all idea number 1. After that section, something new seems to be developing; it goes on for a bit and then seems to trail off into something else. Okay, mark it off where it stops—in the middle of a sentence if that’s where the shift happens—and call that chunk of writing idea number 2. Rinse and repeat for the next section of writing that seems to be talking about one major idea; there’s idea 3. And maybe after that there’s something that’s really just talking about idea number 1 again. Alright, label it accordingly. And so on and so forth until everything I’ve written is visibly labeled according to which major idea it seems to be talking about. I probably won’t keep all of those major ideas, but at least now I can make a more clear-minded decision on what to keep.

The writing probably sucks at this point—it’s repetitive, clumsy, and may even swear once or twice if I was particularly frustrated while I was doing the initial writing. Fortunately, I don’t care if it actually sounds good just yet. Its only job right now is to help me think.

The newly grouped ideas go into a Word document. For each group, I write a header that says basically what idea that section is trying to convey. These are like early drafts of my topic sentences. Again, they’re not finalized, polished topic sentences. They’re just labels that remind me what major idea the stuff in that section is trying to get at.

By doing all of this, what I’ve done is take the jumbled-up thoughts in my head, toss them out onto a piece of paper, and then make visible, physical separations between them so I can address each one independently on the screen. Doing this takes a lot of cognitive load off of my mind: the page remembers the larger argument for me, so I can focus in on refining just one idea at a time and ignore the others until I’m ready to deal with each of them, too.

In any event, it’s probably time for this post to start petering out, so just to recap: separating out your ideas is hard because 1) you have to notice that you have to do it, and then 2) you have to marshal your concentration to get the job done when you’ve got a thousand other cognitive jobs to do, as well. You can probably address these problems by 1) remembering that the relationships between your ideas are just as real as the ideas themselves, and by 2) displacing your ideas onto the page so you don’t have to bear the cognitive load entirely in your head.

So, yeah. Something something elegant conclusion. Bye.