Gather Your Information

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

Guiding question: What information and evidence do I need to include in my writing to achieve my purpose?

John and Kwasi both decide that they want to start cooking to eat more healthily and save money. It's Wednesday evening, and after returning home from classes, they both decide to prepare their dinner, but in two very different ways:

John goes to the supermarket and walks through every aisle. After walking through the entire store, he finally decides that he wants to make jollof rice, so he goes back to aisles with the relevant ingredients and reads all the nutritional labels on the packages before deciding which ingredients to buy. When he returns home, he looks up a jollof rice recipe on the internet. He is only halfway through reading the recipe, when he realizes that he didn't buy all the required ingredients, so he needs to go back to the supermarket to get the missing ingredients. When he returns from the store, he continues reading the recipe. Unfortunately, when he gets to the end of the recipe, he realizes that he doesn't have all the required cooking tools. So after 3 hours of trying to make his own dinner, he gives up, and just orders takeout.

Kwasi also wants to make dinner tonight. He is running a big race tomorrow morning, so he knows that his meal needs to contain a lot of carbohydrates to meet his needs. At first, he wants to make steak, because he is craving some meat. But then he realizes that the meal wont have enough carbohydrates. So after reflecting a little more, he decides to make jollof rice. He looks up a recipe online and notes all the required ingredients and cooking tools. He checks his fridge and cupboards, and realizes that he's only missing one or two ingredients, and he has all the required cooking tools. He makes a grocery list of everything he needs to buy, and heads to the supermarket to purchase the ingredients. When he returns from the supermarket, he follows the recipe and makes a delicious dinner, which also fuels his body with the carbohydrates that he needs for his race the next day.

When you write, do you behave like John, or Kwasi?

Kwasi's process was efficient. He had a clear sense of his purpose, did his research to determine what he needed in order to accomplish his purpose, and gathered the needed pieces efficiently. On the other hand, John wasted a lot of time wandering aimlessly, he gathered his ingredients before he knew what ingredients were actually required, and he didn't even check that he had the neccessary tools to complete the task until the very end. As a result, he didn't accomplish his goal of cooking dinner.

In order to be more like Kwasi, and less like John, it is important that you know your purpose for writing, and start gathering your information before you start drafting.

Benefits of Gathering Information When Planning

There are numerous benefits to gathering required information in the planning step:

• It gives you the chance to focus on the information to ensure that it is accurate.
• It allows you to analyse the strength of your argument and evidence.
• It reduces interruptions during the drafting phase, leading to more continuity and speed during text creation.

Later on, when you draft and revise your text, you may find that additional information is needed. This is fine and to be expected. However, gathering information in the planning stage can reduce the amount of other information you need to collect later. While also helping you strengthen the content and structure of your writing.

Determining the Information Needed (Brainstorming)

• The first set of broad questions to ask yourself when gathering information for your writing is:
  • What is the main topic of my writing? And what is my scope?
  • What do I understand about this topic?
  • What does my audience need to know about this topic?
• When considering the information required to answer those broad questions, it can be helpful to ask yourself the six W/H of your topic and purpose:
  • Who?
  • What?
  • Where?
  • When?
  • Why?
  • How?
• Also, think about if you are making any claims in your writing that require supporting evidence. Using evidence and supporting information will make your writing clear and concrete.
  • e.g., You are writing a university application essay, and you want to write that you "have a passion for technology". What evidence and details could you include to support that claim?
  • e.g., You are writing a report on a new product that your team launched, and you want to write that "the launch was successful". What evidence do you need to include to support that claim?
• Finally, it can also be helpful to use the five pairs of questions shown below to determine additional information you might need to support the claims in your message. These questions will help you gather the information that aligns with some of the text organising patterns that you will learn about in Section 3.8.

• In this information-gathering step, it is ok to gather more information than you eventually need for the text that you will create. However, this informal research phase is helpful because it can also help you ensure that you understand the topic you are writing about.
• This information-gathering step will follow a more formal and systematic research approach for certain types of writing (e.g. research papers, journal articles, data analysis reports). However, since this course is focused on effective written communication in professional contexts, exploring formal research methods is beyond our scope.

Brainstorming to Kickstart Your Writing

If you sometimes struggle to come up with ideas for your writing, it can be helpful to use some brainstorming techniques to get your creative juices flowing.

📖 Read this article on brainstorming

Organising Your Information

As you are gathering your information, you can organise and visualise it using a mind map. To create a mind-map, start by writing your main topic or purpose in the centre of a piece of paper. Then, as associations come to mind, you can draw them out from that starting point. The result will be an image like the one shown below, which can be a great starting point for creating an outline to structure your text.

Source

Some great online tools for mind mapping include:

• Miro: https://miro.com/mind-map/
• Coggle: https://coggle.it/

You can also use tools like Padlet or Google Jamboard to create mind maps.

References

Davis, Kenneth. (2010). The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Business Writing and Communication, Second Edition. McGraw Hill.