4 steps academic writing process
Learning to write is like following a recipe; there is room for creativity, but you need to know the basics. This format teaches students how to divide writing assignments into smaller tasks and schedule these tasks over an extended period of time. In college, it is your responsibility to break large assignments down into smaller projects so you do not have an unmanageable amount of work at the last minute. We should first address the common resistance to form. Beginning writers often protest that imposing formal rules on writing contradicts the notion of writing as a creative art. Sometimes, however, working within a form actually enhances creativity.
4 Steps to Wrangling the Writing Process
If you think that a blank sheet of paper or a blinking cursor on the computer screen is a scary sight, you are not alone. Many writers, students, and employees find that beginning to write can be intimidating. When faced with a blank page, however, experienced writers remind themselves that writing, like other everyday activities, is a process.
Every process, from writing to cooking, bike riding, and learning to use a new cell phone, will get significantly easier with practice. Just as you need a recipe, ingredients, and proper tools to cook a delicious meal, you also need a plan, resources, and adequate time to create a good written composition.
In other words, writing is a process that requires following steps and using strategies to accomplish your goals. Effective writing can be simply described as good ideas that are expressed well and arranged in the proper order.
This chapter will give you the chance to work on all these important aspects of writing. Although many more prewriting strategies exist, this chapter covers six: using experience and observations, freewriting, asking questions, brainstorming, mapping, and searching the Internet.
Using the strategies in this chapter can help you overcome the fear of the blank page and confidently begin the writing process. Prewriting is the stage of the writing process during which you transfer your abstract thoughts into more concrete ideas in ink on paper or in type on a computer screen. Although prewriting techniques can be helpful in all stages of the writing process, the following four strategies are best used when initially deciding on a topic:.
At this stage in the writing process, it is OK if you choose a general topic. Later you will learn more prewriting strategies that will narrow the focus of the topic.
In addition to understanding that writing is a process, writers also understand that choosing a good general topic for an assignment is an essential step. Sometimes your instructor will give you an idea to begin an assignment, and other times your instructor will ask you to come up with a topic on your own. In this chapter, you will follow a writer named Mariah as she prepares a piece of writing. You will also be planning one of your own.
The first important step is for you to tell yourself why you are writing to inform, to explain, or some other purpose and for whom you are writing. Write your purpose and your audience on your own sheet of paper, and keep the paper close by as you read and complete exercises in this chapter.
When selecting a topic, you may also want to consider something that interests you or something based on your own life and personal experiences. Even everyday observations can lead to interesting topics. After writers think about their experiences and observations, they often take notes on paper to better develop their thoughts.
These notes help writers discover what they have to say about their topic. Have you seen an attention-grabbing story on your local news channel? Many current issues appear on television, in magazines, and on the Internet. These can all provide inspiration for your writing. Reading plays a vital role in all the stages of the writing process, but it first figures in the development of ideas and topics. Different kinds of documents can help you choose a topic and also develop that topic.
For example, a magazine advertising the latest research on the threat of global warming may catch your eye in the supermarket. This cover may interest you, and you may consider global warming as a topic. After you choose a topic, critical reading is essential to the development of a topic. If this step already seems daunting, remember that even the best writers need to use prewriting strategies to generate ideas.
The steps in the writing process may seem time consuming at first, but following these steps will save you time in the future. The more you plan in the beginning by reading and using prewriting strategies, the less time you may spend writing and editing later because your ideas will develop more swiftly. Prewriting strategies depend on your critical reading skills. Reading prewriting exercises and outlines and drafts later in the writing process will further develop your topic and ideas.
As you continue to follow the writing process, you will see how Mariah uses critical reading skills to assess her own prewriting exercises. Freewriting A prewriting strategy in which writers write freely about any topic for a set amount of time usually three to five minutes. During the time limit, you may jot down any thoughts that come to your mind.
Try not to worry about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Instead, write as quickly as you can without stopping. If you get stuck, just copy the same word or phrase over and over until you come up with a new thought.
Writing often comes easier when you have a personal connection with the topic you have chosen. Remember, to generate ideas in your freewriting, you may also think about readings that you have enjoyed or that have challenged your thinking. Doing this may lead your thoughts in interesting directions.
Quickly recording your thoughts on paper will help you discover what you have to say about a topic. When writing quickly, try not to doubt or question your ideas. Allow yourself to write freely and unselfconsciously. Once you start writing with few limitations, you may find you have more to say than you first realized. Your flow of thoughts can lead you to discover even more ideas about the topic.
Freewriting may even lead you to discover another topic that excites you even more. The instructor allowed the members of the class to choose their own topics, and Mariah thought about her experiences as a communications major.
She used this freewriting exercise to help her generate more concrete ideas from her own experience. Some prewriting strategies can be used together. For example, you could use experience and observations to come up with a topic related to your course studies.
Then you could use freewriting to describe your topic in more detail and figure out what you have to say about it. Freewrite about one event you have recently experienced.
With this event in mind, write without stopping for five minutes. After you finish, read over what you wrote. Does anything stand out to you as a good general topic to write about? In everyday situations, you pose these kinds of questions to get more information. Who will be my partner for the project? When is the next meeting? Why is my car making that odd noise? You seek the answers to these questions to gain knowledge, to better understand your daily experiences, and to plan for the future.
Asking these types of questions will also help you with the writing process. As you choose your topic, answering these questions can help you revisit the ideas you already have and generate new ways to think about your topic. You may also discover aspects of the topic that are unfamiliar to you and that you would like to learn more about. All these idea-gathering techniques will help you plan for future work on your assignment.
When Mariah reread her freewriting notes, she found she had rambled and her thoughts were disjointed. She realized that the topic that interested her most was the one she started with, the media. She then decided to explore that topic by asking herself questions about it. Her purpose was to refine media into a topic she felt comfortable writing about.
To see how asking questions can help you choose a topic, take a look at the following chart that Mariah completed to record her questions and answers. She asked herself the questions that reporters and journalists use to gather information for their stories. The questions are often called the 5WH questions The questions that reporters and journalists use to gather information for their stories and that writers use in the writing process: Who?
Prewriting is very purpose driven; it does not follow a set of hard-and-fast rules. The purpose of prewriting is to find and explore ideas so that you will be prepared to write. A prewriting technique like asking questions can help you both find a topic and explore it.
The key to effective prewriting is to use the techniques that work best for your thinking process. Freewriting may not seem to fit your thinking process, but keep an open mind. It may work better than you think. Perhaps brainstorming a list of topics might better fit your personal style. Mariah found freewriting and asking questions to be fruitful strategies to use. In your own prewriting, use the 5WH questions in any way that benefits your planning. Choose a general topic idea from the prewriting you completed in Note 7.
Then read each question and use your own paper to answer the 5WH questions. As with Mariah when she explored her writing topic for more detail, it is OK if you do not know all the answers. If you do not know an answer, use your own opinion to speculate, or guess. You may also use factual information from books or articles you previously read on your topic.
Later in the chapter, you will read about additional ways like searching the Internet to answer your questions and explore your guesses. Now that you have completed some of the prewriting exercises, you may feel less anxious about starting a paper from scratch. With some ideas down on paper or saved on a computer , writers are often more comfortable continuing the writing process. After identifying a good general topic, you, too, are ready to continue the process. Write your general topic on your own sheet of paper, under where you recorded your purpose and audience.
Choose it from among the topics you listed or explored during the prewriting you have done so far. Make sure it is one you feel comfortable with and feel capable of writing about.
You may find that you need to adjust your topic as you move through the writing stages and as you complete the exercises in this chapter.
4 Steps to the Writing Process. Prewriting - Organize Ideas; Writing - Write and Prepare for Revisions; Revising - Reorder, Remove and Rewrite; Editing - Focus. Prewriting: This is the planning phase of the writing process, when students brainstorm, research, gather and outline ideas, often using diagrams for mapping out.
A process is a series of actions that are followed to some desired end result. In order for the result to be successful, all steps must be followed. Cooking is a process and a recipe is the directions you follow to get a positive end result.
If you've ever felt the cold, cruel stare of the empty page, you're not alone—you're a writer.
Communication skills, including writing, are some of the most important soft skills employable skills that have more to do with emotional IQ such as common sense, communication, problem-solving, and collaboration that students learn when they are in college because most professions require high competency in written communication, which can be a chance for one to shine or to falter. With emails, memos, letters, texts, and even Tweets, most people spend a fair amount of time at work communicating via the written word. Basically, writing skills make a difference in how you are perceived in college and in the workplace.
The Writing Process
When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. This resource provides a list of key concepts, words, and phrases that multi-lingual writers may find useful if they are new to writing in the North American educational context. It covers concepts and and key words pertaining to the stages in the writing process, style, citation and reference, and other common expressions in academic writing.
The Writing Process: 5 Steps Every Writer Should Know
If you think that a blank sheet of paper or a blinking cursor on the computer screen is a scary sight, you are not alone. Many writers, students, and employees find that beginning to write can be intimidating. When faced with a blank page, however, experienced writers remind themselves that writing, like other everyday activities, is a process. Every process, from writing to cooking, bike riding, and learning to use a new cell phone, will get significantly easier with practice. Just as you need a recipe, ingredients, and proper tools to cook a delicious meal, you also need a plan, resources, and adequate time to create a good written composition. In other words, writing is a process that requires following steps and using strategies to accomplish your goals. Effective writing can be simply described as good ideas that are expressed well and arranged in the proper order. This chapter will give you the chance to work on all these important aspects of writing.
Date published April 24, by Jack Caulfield.
The writing process is something that no two people do the same way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to write.
Steps in the Writing Process
The art of writing is a skill set that takes time and practice to master. Although the time required to become a strong writer depends on your personal learning curve, there are fundamental elements involved in the writing process that are universal. Working on an important writing project? Grammarly can help. Try Grammarly. You may want to write an informational piece about what the topic is or how it works. During this writing process step, thinking about who your audience is can help you better define your topic. This includes finding authoritative sources of information for research and interview purposes. Some examples of authoritative sources include acclaimed academic or industry journals, government or nonprofit research groups, and accredited or certified professional experts. An outline helps you map out your ideas in an organized, easy-to-follow way so that your writing flows smoothly for the reader. This is the part of the writing process where you get to apply your research and outline in writing. With the help of your outline, formulate sentences and paragraphs to express your points. After making improvements to your first draft, reread your writing out loud to ensure that it looks and sounds as you intended. In writing, you may encounter one revision or many. When you feel confident about your revisions, move on to the last writing process step: proofreading.
The 5-Step Writing Process: From Brainstorming to Publishing
Every writer follows his or her own writing process. Being conscious of your own writing process is especially helpful when you find yourself struggling with a particularly tricky piece. Here are five steps towards creating or identifying your personal writing process. So why has that blank page been staring back at you for the past hour? Prewriting identifies everything you need to do before you sit down to start your rough draft. Remember, this is your first rough draft.
