The Writing Process: Writing Essays
Writing essays, or any other form of writing, involves a process that is often fairly time consuming. If you work with the process, though, you will find that your writing will be much more successful than if you wrote a draft quickly and decided that was good enough. Following the process involves managing your time so that you do not start your writing project at the last minute. There are a number of steps:
1. Pre-writing
This is where you gather your ideas and usually involves one or more of the following strategies:
2. Organization
In order to communicate your ideas effectively, you must organize them in a way that takes your audience from one idea to the next clearly and most effectively given your purpose and topic. This usually involves outlining your ideas, sometimes in a scratch outline, other times in a more formal outline. This is also where you should consider what kind of rhetorical strategies you want to use: narration? examples? comparison and/or contrast? and so on. Sometimes it is useful to create an outline after a draft to see in detail how you organized what you wrote, and if that is the most effective way to do this. An outline can be very effective if you use it before you write your draft, but it can also be effective after you write the draft.
3. Write the draft
Once you have your ideas and organizational strategy, writing the draft becomes much easier than if you had tried to start without doing any of the first two strategies. Here you flesh out your ideas.
4. Revision
This may be the most time consuming part of the process. Here you re-write your draft, probably many times. It is good to get someone whose advice you trust to look at it and tell you where your strengths and weaknesses are. Revision is different from editing. Here you are looking at organization, development, strategies, language, and so on.
5. Editing and proofreading
This is the point when you go back and carefully make sure that your spelling and grammar are correct. Also, check to see if you can combine sentences and vary your sentence structures. This is the last part of the process, but it is important. Mistakes in grammar and spelling make it look as though you don't care about your work, or that you are lazy. These kinds of mistakes will always count against you, even when you are writing for a teacher in a non-writing or literature course.
The process looks like a linear one when you see it listed like this, but it is really more fluid and circular than that. Some stages meld into others, and you might need to repeat some stages. For example, you will probably go back and forth between revision and writing drafts. To see the writing process I used for the essays/articles I have published in the "Essays and Articles" section of this website, please place your cursor over "The Writing Process" tab, above, and see the pages I created to show those processes. Also, sometimes you will use all of these steps, sometimes you won't. Sometimes it is more effective to use an outline after you have written a draft so that you can see how you organized it, and then re-organize more effectively. Sometimes, to be honest, you will do some of these steps in your head, especially after you have a number of years of experience in writing essays. This process is often different for other kinds of writing, like poetry or short stories. However, when it comes to essays and academic writing, this process is extremely important, especially for students who don't have much experience in writing reports, essays, or other kinds of academic writing.
Citation Styles: It is important to cite the sources of your information. However, there are many styles to use in doing this. Teachers will expect some kind of academic style, like the MLA or APA. However, if you read the essays and journals I wrote, you'll notice that I use the Associated Press (AP) style. (However, I made some mistakes in it, especially in the journals - can you find and identify those mistakes?) I used the AP style here instead of an academic style like the APA or MLA styles because of the nature of a blog. This isn't academic writing though I realize some of my audience here will be students in college or high school classes. The AP style has evolved to account for the vagaries of digital and broadcast media. Websites and HTML coding can't always handle the kinds of spacing and font requirements that academic styles require, like the MLA style for long quotes. The use of italics can be difficult, too, which is why one of the differences in the AP style is that all titles, regardless of length, get quotation marks. In academic styles, long titles like those of books or movies, get italicized. I tended to use the more well known postal service abbreviations for states instead of the AP style's abbreviations because I thought the USPS abbreviations would be less confusing. Generally speaking, though, you should be consistent in your use of a style.
1. Pre-writing
This is where you gather your ideas and usually involves one or more of the following strategies:
- Brainstorming
- Free associative writing, also known as freewriting
- Research
- Clustering/diagramming
- Keeping a journal: the blog/journal section of this website gives you an example of a journal I have been keeping during my travels across the U.S. Passages from that journal, or items discussed in there, reappear in a number of essays, poems, and stories I wrote after these trips. The journal is a necessary way to record where I go, what I see, and even what I feel. I quickly forget some of what I saw and did even after only a month or two, so having the journal to go to and jog my memory has been extremely valuable. It also allowed me to think through things as I wrote them. Later, I was able to think about things that happened on the trip and write about them with more detail and analysis.
2. Organization
In order to communicate your ideas effectively, you must organize them in a way that takes your audience from one idea to the next clearly and most effectively given your purpose and topic. This usually involves outlining your ideas, sometimes in a scratch outline, other times in a more formal outline. This is also where you should consider what kind of rhetorical strategies you want to use: narration? examples? comparison and/or contrast? and so on. Sometimes it is useful to create an outline after a draft to see in detail how you organized what you wrote, and if that is the most effective way to do this. An outline can be very effective if you use it before you write your draft, but it can also be effective after you write the draft.
3. Write the draft
Once you have your ideas and organizational strategy, writing the draft becomes much easier than if you had tried to start without doing any of the first two strategies. Here you flesh out your ideas.
4. Revision
This may be the most time consuming part of the process. Here you re-write your draft, probably many times. It is good to get someone whose advice you trust to look at it and tell you where your strengths and weaknesses are. Revision is different from editing. Here you are looking at organization, development, strategies, language, and so on.
5. Editing and proofreading
This is the point when you go back and carefully make sure that your spelling and grammar are correct. Also, check to see if you can combine sentences and vary your sentence structures. This is the last part of the process, but it is important. Mistakes in grammar and spelling make it look as though you don't care about your work, or that you are lazy. These kinds of mistakes will always count against you, even when you are writing for a teacher in a non-writing or literature course.
The process looks like a linear one when you see it listed like this, but it is really more fluid and circular than that. Some stages meld into others, and you might need to repeat some stages. For example, you will probably go back and forth between revision and writing drafts. To see the writing process I used for the essays/articles I have published in the "Essays and Articles" section of this website, please place your cursor over "The Writing Process" tab, above, and see the pages I created to show those processes. Also, sometimes you will use all of these steps, sometimes you won't. Sometimes it is more effective to use an outline after you have written a draft so that you can see how you organized it, and then re-organize more effectively. Sometimes, to be honest, you will do some of these steps in your head, especially after you have a number of years of experience in writing essays. This process is often different for other kinds of writing, like poetry or short stories. However, when it comes to essays and academic writing, this process is extremely important, especially for students who don't have much experience in writing reports, essays, or other kinds of academic writing.
Citation Styles: It is important to cite the sources of your information. However, there are many styles to use in doing this. Teachers will expect some kind of academic style, like the MLA or APA. However, if you read the essays and journals I wrote, you'll notice that I use the Associated Press (AP) style. (However, I made some mistakes in it, especially in the journals - can you find and identify those mistakes?) I used the AP style here instead of an academic style like the APA or MLA styles because of the nature of a blog. This isn't academic writing though I realize some of my audience here will be students in college or high school classes. The AP style has evolved to account for the vagaries of digital and broadcast media. Websites and HTML coding can't always handle the kinds of spacing and font requirements that academic styles require, like the MLA style for long quotes. The use of italics can be difficult, too, which is why one of the differences in the AP style is that all titles, regardless of length, get quotation marks. In academic styles, long titles like those of books or movies, get italicized. I tended to use the more well known postal service abbreviations for states instead of the AP style's abbreviations because I thought the USPS abbreviations would be less confusing. Generally speaking, though, you should be consistent in your use of a style.