Christina Krettecos '00 writes on The writing process

Tutoring for the Composition Center, I've seen many students struggle with similar types of writing problems. When a student is stuck without an idea for a paper topic, I advise him/her to take a piece of paper or sit down at a computer and free write on the topic. Often, after writing for awhile without a specific direction, a student finds an interesting idea or a general direction for the paper. When a student has a paper jumbled with too many ideas, I suggest outlining the main idea of each paragraph. By doing so, a student can see whether the ideas follow a general pattern and how to better organize them. The most important piece of advice I give to tutees is to constantly revise, because writing is a continual process.

Kinohi Nishikawa '01 writes on The importance of getting personally involved with your writing

Let's get this straight once and for all: creative, insightful, and enthusiastic writing never travels down a one-way street. Too many of us think writing is an action that necessarily isolates the subject of our criticism; that is, a lot of us tend to place our subject on a pedestal and write about it from afar or, in many cases, from below. And while maintaining a critical distance is essential for all types of writing, stepping back too far can be alienating and frustrating for any writer, even the experienced one.

My best advice is to establish a "dialogue" with your subject. Ask questions; relate the subject's "life" to your own; argue, agree, laugh, and play with it; exercise restraint and be sensitive to its "feelings;" and most important, understand where your subject is coming from so that you know where to position yourself in relation to it.

Don't be afraid to initiate a conversation between you and your subject. This, in my opinion, is the stuff good writing is made out of. Just because your subject doesn't "respond" doesn't mean that your reading audience isn't listening.

Nils Arvold '00 writes on Things that work for him

If you're careful in your approach, you can do the majority of your revision AS you write. Which means you want to spend the time on your ideas and sentences as you work, not after you've thrown a big mess of tangled and inarticulate ideas all over the page.

Most people in college tell you to throw the 5-paragraph essay format out the window when you arrive, but I think it has some value as a guide. The introduction should introduce a specific aspect of a work of literature very generally, with a quotation perhaps, and narrow to a specific thesis statement that addresses not only thematics, but structure (words, etc.). All of the paragraphs should support the thesis, as well as almost all of the sentences, and each paragraph should argue a specific point of the thesis. The conclusion does a little bit of summary and makes more general comments that reflect on what has been argued.

That doesn't seem to be too formulaic - it leaves a lot of room for 'personal style' and approaches to making an argument - and yet it doesn't seem too far off the standard guide. Even if you are only writing about an author's themes, always pay strict attention to detail, namely individual word/phrase choices. This means quoting apt phrases frequently in your paper, if the particular words in that phrase are important in themselves. Writing a great paper means READING very closely.