Informational Writing: My Messy Process

Since attending a summer writing workshop, I’ve been trying to write more informational pieces. I discovered that my process for writing expository text was all over the place. For me, it was very different from writing a narrative, or a vignette, or a poem. Writing about a memory or a moment in time seemed easier. My thought was if I kept writing informational pieces, eventually it wouldn’t feel so hard. I wanted to write an informational piece for this week’s slice but I couldn’t seem to zero in on a topic.  For example, this slice started out seven different ways. It started as a piece about collaboration, then coaching, then my upcoming PLC, then back to coaching, then literacy celebrations, then writer’s notebooks, and then back to coaching again. Purpose and audience were screaming at me, distracting me. For Pete’s sake! Focus, for crying out loud! Some of my topics were geared more to a particular audience. Audience influenced what I wanted to write about. So was I trying to choose a topic or an audience? And in choosing an audience, how would I write about my topic? I needed to determine the purpose for what I wanted to write.

In an effort to organize my jumbled thinking, I made a map of my ideas on my dining room floor. My big ideas were audiences, purposes, and topics. Under Audiences, I listed who I wrote for, other than myself, and where my writing would be published. Under Purposes I listed all the reasons I liked to write. I didn’t have anything under topic yet. With the Tuesday SOL deadline looming, I picked cards from my audience and purpose categories which finally helped me to choose my topic. There . . . now wasn’t that easy! Uhhmm, no. At least audience and purpose stopped screaming at me.

Fred decided to help me out.

Roxy joined in the effort to help me
figure out my topic.

Starting with audience and purpose helped
me narrow my topic.

My husband looked at me and said, "You're not
gonna leave that all over the floor are you?"