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Be a Better Writer

The Writing Process

Anthony R. Garcia

Writing is done in stages, often in a recursive and nonlinear manner.  And though there is no definitive writing process, there are generally agreed-upon stages that writers go through when producing a written work.

Learning more about these stages and reflecting on your own writing process will help you become a stronger writer.

The writing process includes the following stages:

  • Prewriting
  • Drafting
  • Revising
  • Editing
  • Proofreading
  • Publishing
  • Participation

Prewriting

Prewriting happens before writing even a single word. The moment you think about writing, you’ve entered into the writing process. Simply thinking about a topic, its different aspects, the best material to select and read, the half-formed notions of audience, your reasons, your evidence—all of these are part of the prewriting stage.

The term prewriting is a bit misleading though because actual writing is part of this stage. Brainstorming, freewriting, mindmapping, outlining, listing evidence, compiling data, collecting quotes—these writing activities typically occur before starting the first draft, though writers return to them as needed.

Inexperienced writers don’t often give much thought to these prewriting activities, but neglecting them can lead to a frustrating writing experience, and more importantly, it can lead to a frustrating reading experience. Without a plan, it’s hard to know where to start and where to go, and this lack of preparation usually shows up in the written work, damaging the writer’s credibility.

Instead, take advantage of what prewriting strategies offer you.  Brainstorming can give you a plethora of ideas to work with, free writing can help you clarify your thinking, outlining can alleviate anxiety about knowing the direction of your work, and collected quotes and evidence can help you test your claims and enhance credibility.

Give yourself enough time to engage in these activities when working on your writing project, and remember that it’s common to return to this stage while working on your draft. During that time, you’ll recognize the need to revisit reading material, make adjustments to your outline, and brainstorm and free write to solve new problems that arise when drafting.

Drafting

In the drafting stage, you begin writing your piece. You can start from anywhere—beginning, middle, or end— depending on the project and your preferences.  For example, some writers create the introduction and conclusion only after they have written the body.  Some writers start with the parts that come easy to to them, others start with the sections they are least excited about.  Breaking yourself from the notion that you must write the draft in a linear fashion can help you avoid anxiety and save you time.

The best advice I can offer for this stage is to just start writing.  Write at home.  Write at a cafe.  Write in a chair, write while standing, while walking on a desk treadmill.  Listen to music.  Don’t listen to music.  Whatever you need to do to get into a flow.

Here are some additional suggestions:

  • Don’t edit yourself when writing (that comes later). Creating ideas and editing are two different tasks, and putting them into conflict can keep you from getting into a writing flow.
  • Have your notes and quotes handy.
  • Leave blank spaces for ideas you want to add later.
  •  Have access to a thesaurus.
  • Keep unnecessary browser windows and tabs closed to minimize distraction.  Distractions differ from writer to writer—guard against them.
  • Take breaks to refresh.

When finished with the draft, get decent rest before preparing for the revision stage.

Revising

Revision is re-seeing, and it helps to begin this stage with fresh eyes, so be sure to take a break after finishing your rough draft.

In this stage, you’re looking for big picture changes that can improve your piece. You’re not looking at spelling or punctuation or word order; you’re looking at the relevance and depth and arrangement of ideas.

Here are some suggestions and questions to get started:

  • Review your main point (In an essay, this would be the thesis). As you read through the piece, determine whether your supporting ideas contribute to this main point in a consistent and relevant manner. For example, if you’re trying to persuade your audience, have you provided sufficient evidence? Will they accept the connection between the claim and the evidence? Do your examples and supporting details illustrate the point you are making?
  • Does the piece digress toward irrelevant points and information? If so, you’ll need to both delete and add ideas.
  • Does too much personal narrative detract from the topic and lower your credibility? Does too little personal narrative and voice lead to dry writing and a boring experience for your readers?
  • Does the order of your ideas make sense? For example, perhaps you are facing a resistant audience, and you move too quickly into your central argument—in this case, you might be better off moving more cautiously into your argument to avoid losing readers too soon. On the other hand, with a sympathetic audience, you might move quickly into your argument, affirming commonly held beliefs and ending with a strong call to action. In answering these questions, you may find that sections and paragraphs need to be re-ordered.
  • Check over the piece for flow, taking a look at your use of transitions between section, paragraphs, and sentences.

Once you are satisfied with the overall content and focus of your piece, you can move onto the editing stage.

Editing

Having settled on the focus and arrangement of your ideas, you can now move to the sentence level, looking at style, grammar, usage, awkward expressions, ambiguity, issues of clarity, and mechanical consistency (e.g., spelling, punctuation, use of numbers and headings, etc.).  This stage typically comes after the revision stage because you would be wasting time editing sentences that might be deleted during the revision stage.

Though it’s easy to overlook sentence-level work, it is a crucial part of your writing success. Good ideas that are perfectly suited to your target audience mean little if your sentences lack clarity, flow, and consistency. If you lose readers before they get to your stellar ideas and impressive reasoning, none of it matters. Even if you have made your points clearly and fluently, you could be missing opportunities to enhance your rhetorical effect by neglecting sentence-level concerns.

Digging into specific details and examples of editing can be a time-consuming study, but it serves writers well.  Most writers don’t have the luxury of hiring editors, so self-editing becomes an important writing tool.  Even when you do have an editor, your writing will benefit by your being able to participate in editorial discussions.

Proofreading

Proofreading is your final pass through your work. Here, you’re looking for remaining errors, such as misspellings, typos, formatting issues, remaining mechanical problems—and anything else that needs to be fixed before you publish.

Catching errors at this level of detail isn’t easy to do with tired eyes, so be sure to once again give yourself enough rest before editing.  Here are some additional proofreading tips:

  • Create a proofreading list to aid your memory and track your progress.
  • Read aloud
  • Read sentences backward
  • Have other people look over your work.
  • Alternate your editing focus. For example, you might make one pass focusing on spelling issues, another pass focusing on formatting, and so on.
  • Double check numbers, links, and citations.
  • Print your work and grab a pen.
  • Don’t solely rely on automated spelling and grammar check.
  • Know your tendencies. If you struggle with certain areas or are prone to certain mistakes, look specifically for these issues; ask someone else to look for these errors as well.

At this point, you’ve come too far in the writing process to publish unpolished work.  A single typo, unfair as it seems, can disrupt your readers’ experience, taking their attention away from the ideas you worked hard to share.

Publishing

Here is where you share your work. Here is where you expose your ideas to an audience.  That sounds scary, and many writers face at least some fear before sharing their work. For students, this fear can lead to procrastination.  For bloggers, it can lead to a backlog of unpublished posts. But you can’t be a writer until you’re willing to give it away.

So click publish. Submit the paper. Drop the letter in the mailbox. Share your work. And relax.

Well not exactly.

The next section talks about a crucial activity that takes place after the publishing stage:  participation.

Participation

If publishing means sharing your work, then it means assuming the responsibilities that come with sharing. These responsibilities may include responding to the responses of your readers, engaging in follow-up discussion and debate.

Remember, your writing is always being re-written by your audience—they’ll constantly be making new meanings out of it.  They’ll take and place quotes into new contexts. They’ll add ideas. They’ll disagree with you on major points. They’ll make additional connections that you hadn’t noticed, moving your work into new and continuing discussions.  They’ll break your work into bits and remix it with the work of others.

Digital writing makes participation a more salient part of the writing process, but participation has always been there.  Students discuss poor grades on papers with their professors, leading to new understandings of the paper’s qualities, new understandings usually for the student but sometimes for the professor.  Authors publish fiction and make the rounds answering interview questions, make persuasive statements intended to gain new readers (marketing), and give insight into the development of a novel or short story, possibly influencing reader interpretations.  And writer participation directly influences the relationship they have with readers and the relationship readers have with their work.

The importance of participation for writer’s today should be obvious, considering the opportunities of sharing work online and the tremendous opportunities for engaging readers in ongoing discussions.

During the participation stage, writers essentially become part of their own audience, engaging with others to discover just what the written work means.