WRITING AS PROCESS
The process of writing is just as important as the written product. It may be helpful to think of the process as a series of stages beginning several days before you sit down to compose the opening paragraph of a paper.
It is useful to distinguish between a stage of developing ideas, when you don’t want to be critical of your efforts, and an editing stage, when you focus on refining what you’ve done.
Here’s one scheme for stages in the writing process, envisioned as occurring over several days:
1) Ruminating:
Spend time thinking about your topic. Start thinking early, days ahead, perhaps while doing something else—listening to music or exercising.
2) Generating ideas:
Explore trains of thought and potential associations using whatever works best for you.
Techniques include brainstorming with someone else, jotting down ideas on scratch paper, making lists, and free writing.
3) Organizing:
Arrange your ideas in logical order. This may involve numbering the pieces of scrap paper you’ve written on, or it may mean resorting to a more traditional process of outlining.
4) Making a first draft:
This stage of the process is still more about thinking than writing, so it’s important to keep your internal critic under control. The main objective here is to discover a structuring or controlling idea for your essay.
5) Revising:
This is where the best writing gets done, where process finally yields to product. Here’s where your internal critic is most useful, and attention shifts to more detailed issues.
Writing is never “finished.” There is always another way of saying something, perhaps just as effective as the way we’ve chosen. Stopping the process is always provisional.
[Adapted from Alex Johnson’s “Why Isaac Bashevis Singer, Truman Capote, Joseph Conrad and
Virginia Woolf (Among Others) Were Having a Bad Morning”]
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