Writing Strategies — Prompting Questions and Writing Skeletons
How they can help you to identify the key points of your writing and achieve clarity of communication
Introduction
This blog post is part of a series of writing strategies sourced from staff, students and researchers working at the University of Manchester Library. Try all them out and see what works for you!
This post focuses on the strategy ‘prompting questions and writing skeletons’ and how it can help you to identify the key points of your writing and achieve clarity of communication.
It is often said that the hardest part of writing is getting started. Writing the first sentence or paragraph is difficult because it is expected to set the tone for the rest of the text. Writing strategies can help, and various strategies target different points in the writing process.
What is the ‘prompting questions and writing skeletons’ strategy?
Prompting questions are unfinished sentences that ask you to think quickly and specifically about the key points of your writing. This critical practice will help you to refine your thoughts in line with your goals and ensure you are covering everything you need to. You can use this strategy to ask yourself if your writing is answering the questions it needs to.
The skeleton of your project is your plan, and asking these questions will help you to add the context. Once you finish writing these questions, they will form the main hubs of your writing. Your next step is to think about what else you need to include in order to explain these hubs to your reader and make a strong argument.
A few examples of these prompts include:
- Studies/reports that support my problem, research, question, or hypothesis include…
- Studies that contradict my argument, research question, or hypothesis include…. These studies should be examined because…
- Sources that carry the most authority regarding the problem, research question, or hypothesis include…. These have authority because…
- What specific experiment or group of experiments (if any) adequately support the hypothesis and why?
There are many ways for you to use these in your writing.
- You can try and complete all of these prompts
- Pick a few that will be most useful for your writing
- Mix and match!
Why is it helpful?
This strategy helps you to see the main points you want to make and brainstorm structures to optimise the experience for the reader. These prompts and their answers can also be used to form an outline of your write-up so that it is easier for your writing to flow. You can therefore play around with different structures until you find one that helps your ideas to flow well.
We spoke to Olivia, a PhD student in Psychology, who mentioned that one of the major advantages of this technique is that it can help you to take a bird’s-eye view of your work. She mentioned that she enjoys this technique as it allows her to step back from her writing and understand the flow of the piece as a whole. Olivia also said that this technique keeps her focused on the task at hand and prevents her from going off on writing tangents.
Conclusion
Prompting questions and writing skeletons are a great strategy to help you to get started on your work and get your main ideas together. These questions allow you to brainstorm effective structures and gain an overview of your piece. Using this strategy will help you to get into the flow of writing, as well as helping you to keep on track with the help of an improved structure. Most importantly, it’ll also help you feel confident and in control of the writing process.
There’s only one way to find which writing strategies work for you, and that’s by giving it a try! Check out our Medium publication for more writing strategies to try, or join our writing communities and write with us at our Shut Up and Write sessions and Writing retreats. If you found these suggestions helpful, there’s lots more writing support available from My Learning Essentials and My Research Essentials.
By Simone from the Student Team
