One type of transactional writing is writing to inform, in Donald Murray's book, Write to Learn, he points out that one of the reasons to write is to report. To make others understand our knowing and our living, to explain, he continues, as the old hunter came back to the cave and described the mastodon, where it could be found, how it could be trapped. So we as citizens and scholars report back to the community so that what we each learn is shared with others and the collective community knowing exceeds the knowledge of each individual. Murray offers several tips for writing to inform, first he says write with information, give specific revealing details, concrete fax, accurate information. Build a piece of writing from information not from language, being direct, informative, be clear. Readers are not reading transactional writing to be dazzled by your beautiful prose. That doesn't mean you're prose can't be admirable, but it shouldn't get in the way of the information. Anticipate your readers questions, role play your reader and imagine what you would need and want to know and when you would want to know it. Good writing is a conversation with the reader in which the writer hears the readers unspoken questions, how come, what do you mean, so what? Two keys here, what does the reader need to know, this could be challenging describing your audience. You don't want to spend a lot of time telling things they would already know, but you also don't want to assume that they know things that they don't know. Often you can't evaluate the success of an informational essay until you know what audience the writer is writing for. Imagine you know a lot about the life of Harriet Tubman, and you want to write an informational essay about her. What if you are writing this essay for a class of eight year old children? Now imagine you're writing it to deliver at a conference of members of the NAACP, what you tell and how you tell it will be very different. Also important is when does the reader need to know it, organization is a big key with informational writing, okay? There are many ways to organize, you can organize chronologically, particularly if what's being written about follows a timeline. You can organize in a step by step way, do this first, second, third, you can organize starting with the big picture and then moving into the small picture. Here is what a Google Maps view would give you of this particular topic, and now let's hone in on something in particular. You can also organize by comparison and contrast, so there many different ways, there are even more ways than I've mentioned, but organization becomes a key. Answering your readers questions, in writing the reader has no stupid questions, Murray says. The reader must be accepted where the reader is, it's the task of the informing writer to serve the reader who does not know. If you took the first course, the teaching writing process course, then you might recall how 75 years ago the writer was considered the king. And if a reader couldn't follow what the writer was saying, it was the reader's fault, that's totally reversed and absolutely reversed in transactional writing. In answering your readers questions, a little informal research can sometimes help find someone who does not know the subject and see what questions they might want to know. It's always good to test transactional writing because it seeks to provide the reader with something they can learn to do. After you've written it, find someone to read it and see what questions they still have or where they struggled to understand. Another tip from Murray, connect the information with the reader's experience. Give readers information in a form and context that they can use in their own thinking, in their lives, in their work. Help them see what the information you are presenting matters to them, how it fits into their lives and how they can understand it in relation to their own lives. Finally, write in an inviting voice, share your delight and passion for the information with the reader in a voice that focuses on the information to be shared.
