Writing Standards

Almost universally, good writing has these:
- Unity
- Coherence
- Support
Defining the Standards
- Unity: All ideas contribute to a given topic and purpose.
- Coherence: All ideas are clearly expressed and logically connected.
- Support: All key points are adequately developed with relevant, helpful, and credible details.
In other words, good writing should be focused, organized, easy-to-follow, and convincing.
Specifically, what can we use to make our writing effective and strong? We can use specific writing strategies for each writing standards.
Using Writing Strategies for the Standards
For Unity:
- Title.
- Concise introduction with a thesis.
- Topic sentence to begin each body paragraph.
- Conclusion that echoes intro.
For Coherence:
Use these strategies to organize key points and details and to make them clear:
- Logical orders.
- Proper transitions.
- Key term repetition.
- Parallelism.
- Correct language use.
For Support:
In principle, anything that is relevant, helpful and credible can be used to clarify and back up a key point. We just need to give enough such details for each key point.
So, let's focus on these key terms to qualify supporting details:
- Sufficient,
- Relevant,
- Helpful,
- Credible.
Understanding these can help you become a strong writer!