Republic of the Philippines

Region I
PANGASINAN STATE UNIVERSITY
School of Advanced Studies
Urdaneta City

Course Number: CAE 214

Course Title: THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF WRITING
Professor: Dr. Jessica J. Jimenez
Discussants: Raisa De Vera / Jessa Dotimas / Karen Cristhel Dupale / Christopher Padlan

TOPIC 7.2: WRITING AS A PROCESS

I. Introduction

“Writing, itself is a process; the act of transforming thought into print involves a nonlinear sequence of creative
acts or stages.” - James R. Gray

When writers and linguistic researchers describe writing as a process, they are attempting to describe the
incredibly complex system of transforming thought into written communication. It has meant utilizing the stage-
process model-- pre-writing, writing, sharing/responding, revising, editing, and evaluating-- as a teaching tool to
facilitate student writing. To do so, teachers has had to reassess their goals and determine how to marry their
process as a teacher with that of the student writer to improve ultimate product.
This process of discovery through language we call writing can be introduced to your classroom as soon
as you have a very simple understanding of process, and as soon as you accept the full implications of
teaching process, not product.
The writing process itself can be divided into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. The amount of
time a writer spends in each stage depends on his personality, his work habits, his maturity as a craftsman,
and the challenge of what he is trying to say.

Fig. 1. Cathy D’Aoust’s The Writing Process

II. Stages of Writing Processes (D’Aoust, 1996)

A. Pre-Writing
- Designed to stimulate the flow of ideas before any structured writing begins
- Any exercise which stimulates the writer’s inner voice to seek verbalization
- Brainstorming, clustering, debating, freewriting, and fantasizing are examples
- Encourage a free flow of thoughts and help students discover both what they want to say and how to
communicate it on paper
- Facilitates the planning for both the product and the process

B. Writing
- Students allow ideas to take shape by putting words to paper
- Writers may lack any conscious awareness of what they specifically want to communicate; writing
then becomes discovery on the conscious level-- allows for spontaneity and creativity and must
not be impeded by concerns over correctness
- Simplified as the writers let go and disappear into the act of writing
-”Writing is a process of coming into being.” - Sondra Perl, Understanding Composing (1980)

C. Sharing
- Providing an audience and reactions to the writing
- Writing can be a very lonely process; some of the difficulty in writing comes from the fact that it is
one-way communication
- Unlike speech, a writer’s words often go untested. The writers use their own reactions to their words
for primary feedback.
- Given a chance to share with others, student writers gain a sense of the power of their words to
impact others.
- They gain a sense of audience, a significant trusted other, who will be influenced by the words of the
writer.
- At this phase, writers discover an incongruity between the purpose and effect of their writing; writers
may have intended to communicate a specific idea but, through the feedback of peers, learn that
that they did not do so.

D. Responding
- Writers are inspired by effective student models to improve their own communication
- In responding to the writing shared by others, writers gain a clearer sense of what distinguishes
effective from ineffective writing

E. Revising
- Re-viewing of the writing in light of the feedback
- It is a reworking of composition on both semantic and lexical levels; the writers are concerned not
only with the words they have chosen to express their ideas but also with how these words work
together
- Students scratch out, mark over, add rephrase and reorder to make their words consistent with the
inteded meaning
- It is focused and conscious manipulation of words
- Changes may be in words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or in total composition
- Revision can actually occur at any time during the writing process because of the recursive nature of
the act of composing
-”Writing is not simply a linear process but a forward-moving action that exists by virtue of a
backward-moving action.” - Sondra Perl
- Student writers go backward to discover what they said and move forwards to elaborate on it
- The impulse to revise could occur at any time
 F. Editing
- Writers focus on imposing correctness
- The altering and refining phase
- It is a focused, deliberate grammatical concern.
- The writers continue to rework their papers by adding and deleting and by correcting punctuation,
spelling, and grammar
- In keeping with the purpose of their work, the writers conform to the standards of written English

G. Evaluating
- The focused, more conscious phase of the writing process
- The final feedback for the student writers and usually comes in the form of a grade
- One effective technique for this is to have the writers attach statements to their papers in which they
give the criteria they would like used in assessing their work

III. Conclusion
As the teacher facilitates the students’ writing process, it becomes apparent that the writing stages overlap
and sometimes compete for the students’ attention. Student writers do not simply move linearly from procedure
to procedure. Their own recursive inner process dictate the sequence.
In The Writing Process and Process Writing, Seow cites Krashen (1984) that the writing process as a
private activity may be broadly seen as comprising four main stages: planning, drafting, revising, and editing.
As depicted in Figure 2, the stages are neither sequential nor orderly. In fact, as research as suggested, many
good writers employ a recursive, non-linear approach- writing a draft may be interrupted by more planning, and
revision may lead to reformulation, with a great deal of recycling to earlier stages.

Figure 2. Overlapping Stages of the Writing Process

References:
Olson, Carol (ed.). 1996. Practical Ideas for Teaching Writing as a Process. Diane Publishing. University of
California. https://books.google.com.ph/books?
id=aLvDVvvdmmgC&dq=writing+as+a+process&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Richards, Jack and Renandya, Willy (ed.). 2002. “The Writing Process and Process Writing”. Methodology in
Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge University Press.
https://books.google.com.ph/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=VxnGXusQlI8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA315&dq=writing+as+a+process&ots=qhwmud8BjN&sig=2h
tdM3hSmlJrCtXHeYiqCY002xA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=writing%20as%20a%20process&f=false
Villanueva, Victor (ed.). 1997. “Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product”. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A
Reader. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED402614.pdf#page=18