Catherine Savini's Looking For Trouble

Writing a college paper, document, or thesis will always revolve around a theme or a set of questions that need to be answered. How that paper is developed depends on the process used by the author as there are many different ways to approach a written assignment. The article by Catherine Savini, “Looking for Trouble: Finding your way into a writing assignment”, essentially tells us that in order to write an informational paper we must first look for the problem, detail questions related to the problem, and then try to provide some type of answer for the questions.

After reading the article, I thought about my own thought processes when it comes to writing a paper. I follow the same technique I first learned in High School English by answering

3 questions – What (is the issue I would like to discuss); Why (is this an issue); and How (will this issue be solved). I would then write an outline and follow the outline to produce a paper. I realized after doing this a few times that it took too long to write the outline by hand and that I sometimes would forget some of my key points. So I switched to typing out short sentences of what I wanted to convey first; organized those points into my aforementioned outline and then filled in the body of my essay after that. I would reread my essay a few times and make some changes until I was happy with the end result.
If I was given a writing assignment that did not have specific questions or problems, my first thought would be to figure out what would be my topic and what issue would I like to explore concerning it. If the professor gave a generic topic that explored a broad issue then I would simply select an issue related to the topic and develop my essay. This would be a much harder task because I would be responsible for formulating and answering questions that would be the framework for my assignment. It is easier when given a set of questions to answer – the outline has already been given.