Nutshelling

Nutshelling is the simple process of trying to explain the main point of your observations in a few sentences - in a nutshell. When you put your thoughts in a nutshell, you come to see just how those thoughts fit together. You see how each thought is relevant to the others, and what the overall "point" is. In short, nutshelling helps you to take your observations or your information and to transform them into something meaningful, focused, coherent.

Imagine, for example, that you are taking an education course in which you are asked to declare, from your own point of view, why the process of writing is so difficult for student writers. Ask yourself why it is that writing is hard. Your answer, in a nutshell? After considering all sorts of responses, you decide that writing is hard because it is difficult to find original structures for an idea.

Still, this observation doesn't seem to you to be able to lift an entire paper. So you keep on. You raise questions. Should teachers expect originality from student writers? And if they do expect originality, why do teachers promote rigid ways of writing, such as the five-paragraph theme? Why, indeed, do teachers insist on an easily identifiable thesis sentence? Why do they flinch when they see fragments or run-ons? Why don't professors encourage experimentation with structure, syntax, and style?

Now that you've raised some really sharp questions, you'll want to try nutshelling again. What point are these questions trying to make, in a nutshell? Your answer: The process of writing is difficult for students because they are caught between their professors' conflicting expectations. On the one hand, professors hope that their students will be original; on the other, they insist that their students conform to conventions. What a dilemma for the young writer!

But yourdilemma is solved. You have "nutshelled" your way to a promising idea for a paper.

Broadening Your Topic

What happens when you've put your thoughts in a nutshell and they seem too "small"? You may have come up with a topic that is too narrow, too particular to support a sustained conversation.

Say, for example, that you've noticed that a novelist likes to talk about lipstick. He describes his characters as they put on lipstick. He allows his characters to leave lipstick stains on glasses. He talks about different shades of lipstick and how they reflect different moods.

You've collected some passages from the novel, and you think that you can write an essay that chronicles the use of lipstick as a metaphor in this story. But it's not enough simply to chronicle the appearance of lipstick in the novel - first it appears in chapter one, then it appears in chapter four, and so on. Instead, you have to make some declaration about what this recurring image means.

After writing your discovery draft, you come up with the idea that the writer uses lipstick to call attention to the fact that the characters are trying to mask their feelings. While this observation is a promising one, it still isn't "big" enough. Why not? Because it remains an observation, not an argument; it lists howA and B and C mask their feelings without addressing the matter of whythis masking is important to consider. How do you broaden your topic so that you feel that you have something important to say?