Writing process, getting started

Assume you are at the very beginning of writing a document. The blank page—or the blank screen—can be intimidating. You may suffer from writer s block. Author Peter De Vries said I love being a writer. What I can t stand is the paperwork. Consider a process for getting started—it works for me and might work for you. 

So far we have started with the chemical formula of a compound and decided on its systematic name. Being able to reverse the process is also important. Often a laboratory procedure describes a compound by name, but the label on the bottle in the lab shows only the formula of the chemical it contains. It is essential that you are able to get the formula of a compound from its name. In fact, you already know enough about compounds to do this. For example, given the name calcium hydroxide, you can write the formula as Ca(OH)2 because you know that calcium forms only Ca ions and that, since hydroxide is OH, two of these anions are required to give a neutral compound. Similarly, the name iron(ll) oxide implies the formula FeO, because the Roman numeral 11 indicates the presence of the cation Fe and the oxide ion is 0 . 

For less casual conventional writing, the situation can be more difficult. In email messages, one finds that some writers do not use an upper cases characters at the start of a sentence, or that new-lines are used as sentence boundaries and no ending punctuation is found. We also come across the problem in email that the form of the headers is intended for email programs to parse and process and not for reading aloud. So the notion of sentence is unclear here. To get around this, we simply have to decide in what form we will read this information and so what form the sentences will take in these genres. One approach is to have each line as a sentence, another is to somehow process the header into a spoken list or other structure. 

While you may think you already know your current processes, the only way to make sure is to walk the process in the way described in section 5.3 above. Mapping a process involves creating a very simple flow chart. This is best done with a pad of paper, a pencil - and a smile. Start at the point where a customer order comes into the company. This could be with a salesman in the field, over a phone, through the fax or via a computer. Write down the name of this step and draw a box around it. Ask whoever picks this order up what happens next. Very probably it gets reviewed, logged in or put on someone s desk. Any of these options is a step. Write this down on your pad of paper below the first step. Draw... 

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