The following key terms often come up in discussions about academic writing, and many writing programs have chosen to define them in an effort to clarify the conversation about what they are expecting students to learn.
On first glance, these definitions might look simple, even self-evident, but they aren’t (read our definition of “conventions” to find out why). For one, they have been designed to describe academic writing across multiple disciplines, each with its own approach to problem, or argument, or idea. They have also been designed to emphasize certain habits of mind we value at EWP, like inductive writing (writing-to-think) and extensive drafting. In many, there is a distinction between process and product, e.g. in how we might think of “problem” at the beginning of a writing project, and how it might turn up in a finished essay. Our extended definitions often anticipate the recalibrations many students have to make when transitioning from high school to college. These explanations are not exhaustive, nor are they to be understood as dogma. Instead, they are designed to clarify the creative and intellectual potential of each term. They have been written for students who are working out how to stitch the experiences of their different classes together: who want to examine more closely the processes of critical thinking and writing.
A problem is a puzzle or question that sets into motion a process of inquiry, which evolves through representing and analyzing evidence.
Evidence comes in many forms and refers to the range of sources a writer selects, represents and analyzes in order to develop an argument.
A representation is a place of descriptive focus in an essay that emphasizes the writer’s experience of encountering a piece of evidence and allows the reader to encounter that evidence, in turn.
Analysis is a critical act that constructs and reveals the meaning, significance, and implications of evidence for the reader.
An argument is a series of interpretive claims or debatable propositions, motivated by inquiry and developed through analysis of a body of evidence.
An idea is a claim or insight that emerges as an argument progresses and governs an essay’s development and structure.
Structure refers to the organization of an essay’s parts on multiple scales (e.g. sentences, paragraphs, sections, parts, motifs) in order to reveal and advance the essay’s argument and idea to the reader.
Signposting refers to a range of rhetorical strategies that sets a pace of reasoning for the essay by signaling transitions, establishing key terms, and clarifying structural design.
Conventions are grammatical, formal, and stylistic codes a writer can adopt (or intentionally break) to demarcate an essay’s reading public and signal how that piece of writing might be read.
Voice is the tonal quality of the writer’s thought as reproduced on the page.
A problem is a puzzle or question that sets into motion a process of inquiry, which evolves through representing and analyzing evidence.
Problems foreground the significance of not-knowing, which is a primary driver in both scholarly and creative endeavors. They arise through a writer’s encounter with evidence and take many forms, including questions, curiosities, puzzles, and doubts. Outside an essay, problems may appear to us as things that need to be resolved, preferably as quickly as possible, but in writing, they identify new intellectual territory, new directions to move toward, rather than away from.
A writer’s sense of the problem they are exploring tends to develop and change during the drafting process as they clarify its significance for themselves and their readers. An intellectually ambitious problem might be phrased concisely, but it will almost always offer a range of possible responses. Articulated near the beginning of a finished essay, a problem acts as an inciting incident: it pulls the reader in, establishes the focus of the essay, and conveys significance. It might well lead to a sequence of smaller questions or problems throughout the essay that each structures or directs a section.
Evidence comes in many forms and refers to the range of sources a writer selects, represents and analyzes in order to develop an argument.
An individual piece of evidence can serve many purposes. For example, you might use evidence to provide background or other contextualizing information, draw attention to an example or object of analysis, serve as a “lens” or theoretical perspective, or introduce arguments that complement, complicate, or contrast with your own. Academic disciplines follow different conventions for evidence and use different naming assumptions: humanities scholars make distinctions between primary and secondary sources, or between objects of analysis themselves and commentaries on them; social scientists often differentiate between qualitative and quantitative (or numerical) evidence; and in the sciences, research literature is referred to as primary literature.
In all disciplines, evidence tethers a writer’s thinking to the world by grounding arguments in concrete detail. The need for evidence forces us to be specific, and often puts us in conversation with other writers and texts. Part of the challenge in drafting an essay is to select, integrate, analyze, and synthesize evidence without overly-simplifying or misrepresenting. Whether you encounter evidence in written, visual, oral, performative, experiential, quantitative, or some other form, your task as a writer is to represent it fully and fairly, with enough context and explanation so someone who has no knowledge of it would still have a good sense of the originating material. In a finished essay, rhetorical signposting and careful quotation are used to make it clear how your own argument builds from the evidence you have amassed, arranged, and analyzed.
A representation is a place of descriptive focus in an essay that emphasizes the writer’s experience of encountering a piece of evidence and allows the reader to encounter that evidence, in turn.
In academic writing, an essay’s evidence is sometimes selected and presented without calling attention to the fact that it is being selectively presented by the writer. In these moments, evidence is foregrounded, and the writer moves into the background. But there are other moments when the evidence demands a different approach, when it is not “just” the evidence that is significant to the argument as much as it is the writer’s encounter with that evidence which needs to be carefully described and analyzed. By making the writer’s presence in the essay more palpable, representations invite readers to align themselves with an authorial, perceiving mind.
Writing a representation is a very useful early drafting strategy, because it invites you to pay careful attention to your own habits of perception, to tease out reactions and questions you might have. In subsequent drafts, and as your argument develops, you can use representation to direct the pacing of your essay. As the writer emphasizes an encounter, analysis often appears to be subordinated to narrative description, and though the pace of an essay’s argument can appear to slow with these details, it is always in advance of a new turn or realization in the essay, an acceleration in the essay’s argumentation.
In a finished essay, representations often combine techniques of description, summary, paraphrase, quotation, and explanation. Selected details should never give a false impression of the whole.
Analysis is a critical act that constructs and reveals the meaning, significance, and implications of evidence for the reader.
A writer analyzes by selecting evidence, parsing it into constituent parts, scrutinizing telling details, identifying patterns and divergences, and articulating meaning and significance. While analysis is often thought of as something that is performed on one piece of evidence in isolation, it also involves synthesizing data or text from multiple sources in order to construct conceptual relationships between them. You perform analysis on your own developing argument when you reflect on preceding claims and articulate a new implication, complication or nuance. Accordingly, the work of analysis requires patience and persistence, a willingness to reckon with dead ends and wrong turns and to follow-up on insights, especially unexpected ones, as they emerge. Analysis is an instigator of momentum and depth of thought in an essay; without analysis, there can be no claim or argument, and without an argument, there can be no governing idea.
An argument is a series of interpretive claims or debatable propositions, motivated by inquiry and developed through analysis of a body of evidence.
An argument is motivated by a writer’s inquiry into a problem and is more interested in the counterfactual rather than the commonsense: it anticipates what might surprise the reader. It is built as claims about evidence are connected to each other. Each claim is developed by reflecting on the significance of one’s analysis of evidence that addresses the essay’s motivating problem. When persuasive, an argument gives readers an experience of momentum, particularly when claims are causal (“If this is the case, then…”) rather than sequential (“And…”). In a finished essay, arguments are presented as a set of cumulative propositions which determine the shapes of paragraphs and sections.
There is a difference between how an argument develops in the drafting process, and how it is presented in a finished essay. In some disciplines and genres, writers prefer to present their argument very deductively: upfront, in abstracts, thesis statements, or in very directed topic sentences at the beginning of paragraphs. In other essays, the argument emerges and develops more inductively, with claims appearing at the ends of paragraphs after the evidence is presented and analyzed. Yet regardless of how it is presented in a finished essay, a nuanced argument is developed in the drafting process through open-minded, patient and empathetic analysis, in considering evidence as sites of exploration rather than sources of proof. These arguments tend to form through writing rather than only relying on essay pre-planning.
An idea is a claim or insight that emerges as an argument progresses and governs an essay’s development and structure.
The writing process sometimes begins with the spark of an idea, typically one you cannot yet fully explain: an intuition about the significance of a piece of evidence, or a gut response to an emerging question, puzzle, or problem. In many cases, your idea will change dramatically or only take form during the revision process, when you have had time to reconsider your early responses to the evidence you are analyzing and respond to feedback from your first readers. When asked about the significance or implications of an essay’s argument, a reader will often state its idea.
In some essay genres, the consolidation of an idea is known as a thesis and is presented in the first paragraph. In others, the conceptual terms or building blocks of an idea might be revealed at the beginning of a finished essay, but the exact relationship between these terms--and the significance of that relationship for your problem--is only revealed by the end of the essay.
Structure refers to the organization of an essay’s parts on multiple scales (e.g. sentences, paragraphs, sections, parts, motifs) in order to reveal and advance the essay’s argument and idea to the reader.
There are persistently universal structural forms in writing, such as a beginning, middle and an end. Other structural forms are predetermined by genre (i.e. “five paragraph essay”) or by the requirements of a given publication or discipline: in the sciences, structure is often created by clearly delineated sections marked by headings, and in the liberal arts, an essay prompt might direct the stages of your argument. In other essays and texts (across many disciplines) structure is designed through the drafting process: content generates form, rather than being shaped by it.
Some people think of structure in visual terms; others in terms of key conceptual terms or chronology. Structure can be created through recursion, when a writer revisits earlier arguments to add complexity and/or underscore the cumulative implications of a particular piece of evidence. Multiple structural strategies might be used in an essay, but regardless of type or complexity, all propose a relationship between the parts of an argument and its whole. In that sense, structure can be a powerful aid to coherence.
Signposting refers to a range of rhetorical strategies that sets a pace of reasoning for the essay by signaling transitions, establishing key terms, and clarifying structural design.
If structure is often thought of as a purpose-built container for our thinking, signposting refers to a variety of strategies we use to help our reader to move through the essay, setting a pace to our argument that anticipates the readers’ needs. Students often refer to signposting as “good flow.” In a finished essay with “good flow,” there is a heightened awareness of the timing of information for the reader: the writer knows how to briefly cover well-worn ground, or slow down to explain the counterintuitive or emphasize a crucial turn. It is clear the reader’s needs have been anticipated. Key conceptual terms are explained and if their definition shifts through the course of the essay, the writer points that out and considers the implications. Signposting is often pronounced at the beginning and endings of paragraphs when we clarify the point of one paragraph and the necessity for the next. Outsized effects can be obtained by seemingly minor shifts in sentence structure: the decision to use a compound sentence or a complex one; a reordering of clauses; the addition of a clarifying or emphatic phrase. In a finished essay, signposting might appear “natural,” but more often than not it involves a tinkering curiosity throughout the drafting process, which also helps to identify redundancy or confused thinking.
Conventions are grammatical, formal, and stylistic codes a writer can adopt (or intentionally break) to demarcate an essay’s reading public and signal how that piece of writing might be read.
We often think of conventions as fixed or unchanging systems, as citation and formatting rules we learn in order to apply to our work in the final stages of completing an essay. Though conventions vary across disciplines and time periods, consistency in practice is key, and one’s growing ease with them is often an indication of whether you claim membership in a given discipline. Yet conventions are not just about adherence. Embedded in formal, grammatical and stylistic conventions are particular expectations about what counts as knowledge and how that should be conveyed to a reader. Conventions make some of these values explicit, while inevitably encoding others. Studied carefully, conventions often reveal ideologies of knowledge.
Voice is the tonal quality of the writer’s thought as enacted on the page.
Voice performs an active, thinking, feeling mind. A writer’s voice can range from formal or detached to intimate or confessional; earnest to ironic; authoritative to speculative. Voice determines what details are shared or left out, what values emphasized or best left implied. All essays have a voice, but some writers foreground it and others minimize it.
Though voice is often characterized as individual, it is developed by anticipating a community of readers and a cultural context. Voice is always a negotiation between 1) the deliberate and individual choices you can make about diction, syntax, and stance (along with structure, selection of evidence, or type of argument); 2) broader grammatical, formal and stylistic conventions; and 3) cultural expectations about how any writer conveys authority (ethos). As such, voice helps to establish a relationship between the writer, subject, and reader. This negotiation will likely shift with every essay you write, but over time you will start to sense certain constants in how you respond to a wide variety of writing prompts and tasks. These constants can distinguish you as a writer, and are often referred to by readers as more longstanding elements of style.