The Writing Process

Writers write, composers compose, from the time they select something to write/compose about. They
go through a process of putting efforts in the stages of: drafting, revising, and editing; until they send
their writing out into the world. The commonly called writing process also includes strategies that help
writers move more quickly and efficiently these stages.

Thinking about how to write? What to be done? Timing? Conditions/environment? Resources used?

Have you ever thought about how to write? … what do you do when you are assigned to write a paper
due in one week? Do you sit down that day and start writing the introduction: or do you sit down but do
something else instead? If you don’t work on the assignment right away, do you begin two days before
deadline, or is your favorite time the night before the paper is due? Do you write a few pages a day,
every day, and let your paper emerge gradually? Or do you prefer to draft it one day, revise the next,
and proofread it just before handing it in?
What writing conditions do you seek? Do you prefer your own room? Do you like to listen to certain
kinds of music? Do you deliberately go somewhere quiet, such as the library? Or do you prefer a coffee
shop, a café’, or a booth at McDonald’s?
With what do you write? Your own computer with Microsoft software in it, or the school’s computer with
whatever software is available? Or on a typewriter? Or with a pencil on lined paper? Or do you first
write with your favorite pen and then copy the result onto a computer?

Which of the habits or methods described here is the right one? Which technique yields the best
results?
They all work!
There is no single best away to write. Different people prefer and tolerate wildly different conditions and
still manage to write well. While there is no best way to write, some ways do seem to work more, on
more occasions, than others.

On one hand writing is, has been, and will always remain a complex, variable, many-faceted process
that refuses to be reduced to a step-by-step procedure or foolproof formula.
On the other hand, people have been writing since the dawn of history, and during that time some
habits and strategies have proved more helpful than others.
Learning writing process saves us all: time, grief, and energy. Perhaps all three!

The five carefully identified yet overlapping and often non-sequential Phases of the Process of Writing
are:
1- Planning, 2- Drafting, 3- Researching, 4- Revising, & 5- Editing.

Using your native language when composing in English

One may want to compose in both his/her native language as well as in English when working on a writing assignment. For
e.g. you may brainstorm, make notes, or create outlines in your native language, or you could use native-language words or
phrases when you are not sure of the English equivalents. Using your native language may highly help you avoid writer’s
block and develop fluency in English. Periodically you should evaluate the effectiveness of your composing strategies. For
instance, if you find that using a native language-to-English dictionary often results in unidiomatic constructions, you may
want to become more familiar with a good English-to-English dictionary.
 Planning

Planning involves:
(1) Creating (2) Discovering (3) Locating (4) Developing (5) Organizing & (6) trying out ideas.

Writing doesn’t happen accidently but on purpose. To produce good writing, regardless of who started
it, we need to understand and take control of our own purpose. The 03 broad and overlapping purposes
of writing are:
i. Writing to discover;
ii. Writing to communicate; &
iii. Writing to create.

Think first about the range of purposes that writing serves. People write to discover what’s on their
minds, figure things out, vent frustrations, keep records, and remember things. They write to
communicate information, ideas, feelings, experiences, concerns, and questions. And they sometimes
write for the pleasure of creating new forms, imaginary concepts, and various experiences.

Writers plan deliberately when they make notes, turn casual lists into organized outlines, write journal
entries, compose rough drafts, and consult with others. They also plan less deliberately while they walk,
jog, eat, read, browse in libraries, converse with friends, or wake up in the middle of the night thinking.

At its beginning, a writing task has an almost unlimited number of ways of being accomplished, so
planning often involves articulating these possibilities and trying some while discarding others. Planning
also involves limiting those options, locating the best strategy for the occasion at hand, and focusing
energy in the most productive direction.

Planning comes first. It also comes second and third, no matter how careful your first plans, the act of
writing usually necessitates that you keep planning all the way through the writing process, that you
continue to think about why you are writing, what you are writing, and for whom.
When writers are not sure how their ideas will be received by someone else they often write to
themselves first, testing their ideas on a friendly audience, and find good voices for communicating with
others in later drafts.

As a teacher, during the planning process for English 1 notes, I was both trying out ideas and exploring
broadly and narrowing my thinking to focus on my purpose as a writer and the purposes that the notes
compiled by me will serve. I had to consider my audience, who all will be using the notes. I had to find
my voice not only as an English 1 teacher but as a compiler / writer / composer. Would I be friendly and
casual, authoritative, and serious?

We spent some time inventing and discovering ideas, figuring out what kind of information I, or my
readers knew, and where to find all what that is not known.

Strategies for Planning

1. Plan to plan. Make planning a first, separate stage in the writing process.
2. Plan to continue planning while you draft, research, revise, and edit.
3. When you plan, write out crazy as well as sane ideas. While the wild ones may not in
themselves prove useful, they may suggest others what to do.
4. When stuck for ideas, try to articulate in writing or speech, how you are stuck, where you are
stuck, and why you think you are stuck. Doing so may help you get unstuck.
 Drafting

At some point all writers / thinkers need to move beyond thinking, talking, and planning; and actually
start Writing. Many writers prefer to schedule a block of time i.e. an hour or more, to draft their ideas,
give them shape, and then see what they look like.
One of the real secrets to good writing is simply Learning to Sit Down and Write!
Drafting is the intentional production of language to convey information or ideas to an audience. First
drafts are concerned with ideas, with getting the direction and concept of the piece of writing clear.
Subsequent drafting, which includes revising and editing, is concerned with making the initial ideas
ever sharper, more precise and clear.
While most writers hope their first draft will be their final draft, it seldom is!
Still, as a writer try to make your early drafts as complete as possible: to compose in complete
sentences, to break into paragraphs where necessary, and to aim at a satisfying form.
At the same time, allow time for second and third drafts, and may be more.
Sometimes it is hard to separate drafting from planning, researching, revising, and editing.
It happens that sometimes when we have sat down to explore a possible idea in a notebook, we found
ourselves drafting part of a chapter instead. Whereas sometimes, when we are trying to advance an
idea in a clear and linear way, we kept returning instead to revise a section just completed. While most
serious writing, every phase of the writing process can be considered recursive i.e. moving back and
forth almost simultaneously and maybe even haphazardly, from planning to revising to editing to
drafting, back to planning, and so on.
The different high school assignments may have various strategies for drafting i.e. including recounting
experience, explaining things, arguing positions, interpreting texts, and reflecting on the world; in both
the draft and the finished stages of writing.

Strategies for Drafting

1. Sit down and turn on your computer; or place paper in your typewriter, or open your writing
notebook and pick up a pen. Sit still and write for half an hour.
2. Plan to throw away your first page. This simple resolution will help your relax, and let the
momentum of the writing take over. Later, you may decide to keep some of t his page.
3. Compose in c hunks. Its hard to write a whole term paper; it’s fairly easy to write a section of it;
it’s easier still to write a paragraph; in other words, even large projects start with single words,
sentences, and paragraphs.
4. Allow time to revise and edit. Start drafting any writing assignment as soon as you can, not the
night before it’s due.
 Researching

Writers need something to write about. Unless they are writing completely from memory, they need to
locate ideas and information even personal essays and experiential papers can benefit from
additional factual information that substantiates and intensifies what the writer remembers.

A college student does a form of research everytime he/she writes an analysis or an interpretation of
a text, reading and then rereading the text is the research.

We do research when we compare one text to another. We do research to track down the dates of
historical events. We do research when we conduct laboratory experiments, visit museums, or
interview people in our college or office or social or neighborhood community.

Whenever we are writing about unfamiliar subjects, we have two choices:

• To research and find things out, or
• To bluff with unsupported generalizations.
Which kind of paper would we prefer to read? Which kind of writing will we profit by doing?

Talking about how to write papers that require research!

Consider research as a natural part of almost every writing assignment. However, one common
college assignment, the research essay, will mostly require students or writers to do more extensive
research, use a more formal style and format, and write a longer paper than most other assignments.
Research for college papers is conducted either in the library or out in the field, and after gathering
information, writers need to describe how to use and document the sources.

Because the document system appropriate for a paper depends largely on the discipline in which it is
written, the grammar and composition books tells specific instructions and models for documenting
research papers.

Strategies for Writing with Research

1. Consider incorporating research information into every paper that is to be written. For
interpretive papers, revisit your texts; for argument and position papers, visit the library. For
experiential papers, revisit places and people.
2. Research in the library. The library is the informational center of the university; using it well will
make all of your writing and learning more substantial.
3. Research people. Interview experts to add a lively and local dimension to your papers.
4. Research places, visit setting in which you can find real, concrete, current information.
5. Learn to document sources, whenever you do research, write down
a. Who (the author or speaker);
b. Said what (an idea or quote);
c. Where (publication or site); &
d. When (date).
Then, as needed, look up the specific forms required in specific disciplines.
 Revising

Somewhere in the middle to later stages of writing, writers revise the drafts they have planned,
started, and researched.

Revising involves rewriting to make:

✓ The purpose clearer,
✓ The argument stronger,
✓ The details sharper,
✓ The evidence more convincing,
✓ The organization more logical,
✓ The opening more inviting, and
✓ The conclusion more satisfying.

Consider revising separate from editing, yet the two tasks may not always be separable.

Essentially revising occurs at the level of ideas; whereas editing occurs at the level of the sentence
and word.

Revising means reseeing the drafted paper and thinking again about its direction, focus, arguments,
and evidence. Editing involves sharpening, tightening, and clarifying the language, making sure that
paragraphs and sentences express exactly what is intended.

For example revised editions, mostly yearly, of the same book is released.

While it is tempting to edit individual words and sentences as we revise, revising first saves time and
energy. Revising to refocus or redirect often requires that we delete paragraphs, pages, and whole
sections of our draft – which can be painful if we have already carefully edited them.

Recommended is making revision a dynamic and aggressive activity.

Strategies for Revising

1. Plan to revise from the beginning. Allow time to examine early drafts from beginning to end for
main points, supporting evidence, and logical direction.
2. Revise by limiting your focus. Many first drafts bite off more than they can chew. When your
revise, make sure your topic is narrow enough for you to do it justice.
3. Revise by adding new material. An excellent time to do additional research is after you have
written one draft and see exactly where you need more information.
4. Revise by reconsidering how you tell your story. Consider the effects that other points of view
and tenses may have on your subject.
5. Revise for order, sequence, and form. Have you told your story the only way you can, or are
there alternative structures that would improve how you tell it?
 Editing

Whether writers have written t here, five or ten drafts, they want the last one to be perfect. When
editing, writers pay careful attention to the language they have used, striving for the most clarity and
punch possible.

Many writers edit partly to please themselves, so their writing sounds right to their own ear. At the
same time, they also edit for their intended readers.

The goal of editing is to improve communication. After you have spent time drafting and revising your
ideas, it would be a shame for readers to dismiss those ideas because they were poorly expressed.

Check the clarity of your ideas; the logic and flow of paragraphs; the precision and power of words;
and the correctness and accuracy of everything, from facts and references to spelling and
punctuation.

In finishing 01 book for instance, the writer or team of writers go over every word and phrase to make
each one expressed his/her or their ideas precisely. Then the editor does the same. They the
manuscript is sent to other experts on writing, and they too go over the whole manuscript. And then
the writer(s) revise and edit again.

Because there are so many different things to look for when you edit your writing, the editing section
in the books of grammar and composition normally occupies more than half the volume. It is
organized into several subparts for easy reference. They include:

• Editing for Effectiveness

Covers strategies for attracting and holding your readers’ attention with clear and vital
language, paragraphs that flow logically from point to point, sentences that present ideas
in a form matched to their content, words that express your thoughts as precisely as
possible.

• Editing Grammar
Shows how to edit writing so that it follows the grammatical conventions of Standard
English and allows readers to see your ideas clearly, unencumbered (imaginative,
creative) by distracting or confusing mistakes.

• Editing Punctuation
Discusses conventional use of periods, commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks,
and other punctuation marks.

• Editing Mechanics
Covers additional conventions of presenting language in written form.

Strategies for Editing

1. Read your draft out loud. Does it sound right to your ear? Your ear is often a trustworthy guide,
alerting you to sentences that are clear or confused, grammatically correct or incorrect.
2. Read your draft with fresh eyes. Try to imagine how your paper will be interpreted by someone
who has never seen it before.
3. “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify.” Henry David Thoreau offers this advice about both life and writing
in his book Walden. Simplify words, sentences, paragraphs, the whole paper so that you make
your point clearly and directly.
4. Delete unnecessary words, the easiest of all editing actions is to omit words that do not carry
their own weight.
5. Proofread by reading line by line, using a ruler to cover the following sentences. This force
your eyes to read word by word and allows you to find mistakes you might otherwise miss.
This is important advice even if you use a spell checker on a computer, for it will not catch all
mistakes.