by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
There are various techniques to start a piece of writing. One involves copying the words of another writer for a sentence or two until your brain warms and your own words flow. I think of those words as writing seeds.<\/strong><\/p>\n Staring at the screen with the little cursor bar blinking with a frequency that someone at Microsoft knew was the most irritating Hertz for frustrated writers. Okay, I know the subject matter I am about to describe, but the first sentence or two, what are they? What are they? What are they?<\/p>\n I was writing parts of a proposal at work this last week and I was stuck. Pause. Reflect. Pause again. Reflect some more, but still nothing on the screen. Then it hit me. Writing seeds or page starters or ticklers or some title for what I was about to do. I grabbed a paper I had recently read on the technology concerning the technology we were proposing. Scanning a bit, there it is, that paragraph. I typed the first sentence of the paragraph verbatim. I paraphrased the second sentence of the paragraph. I took off from there and didn\u2019t stop typing words into the document for an hour. Done.<\/p>\n I first learned this technique when in graduate school. Dr. Richard Conners I and were writing an academic paper. We knew the subject matter and basically how we were to describe it, but we were stuck at the first page. I say we, but I was the graduate student and responsible for writing the entire first draft. Dr. Conners. \u201cWait a minute,\u201d he told me. He then reached into his bookcase and pulled an academic journal, thumbed through the pages, and returned, \u201cHere. Let\u2019s use this one.\u201d He was pointing to a paper that had a similar form to the one we were to write. \u201cCopy this first paragraph and use it as our first paragraph.\u201d I protested mildly about plagiarism and such. \u201cWe\u2019ll change it later,\u201d he said, \u201cbut copy this to get us started.\u201d<\/p>\n