4.1 Stages of 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.
Donald M. Murray, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and educator, presented his important article, “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product,” in 1972. In the article, he criticizes writing instructors’ tendency to view student writing as “literature” and to focus our attention on the “product” (the finished essay) while grading. The idea that students are producing finished works ready for close examination and evaluation by their instructor is fraught with problems because writing is really a process and arguably a process that is never finished.
Murray explains why writing is an ongoing process:
What is the process we [writing instructors] should teach? It is the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, and to communicate what we learn about our world. Instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness. (4)
The Writing Process
The writing process is a series of steps that a writer goes through to move from a blank page to a completed written composition. Understanding and using the steps of the writing process can help you avoid the all-too-common mistake of trying to write a completed final draft from scratch as one single step, which is doomed to produce inferior work. Although experienced writers eventually customize their writing processes, nearly all successful writers–from students to professionals–use some form of this writing process, of which there are five steps:
These are the five steps in the writing process:
- Prewriting
- Outlining
- Drafting
- Revising
- Editing
Of course, you must keep in mind that in every step of the writing process, you must guide your decisions based on your subject, your audience, and your purpose, as noted at the beginning of this textbook.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to approach this process. The most important lesson to understand about the writing process is that it is recursive, meaning that you need to move back and forth between some or all of the steps. Additionally, these steps can look different to many writers and this process changes depending on the writer’s preferences. Allowing yourself enough time to begin the assignment before it is due, will give you time to move from one step to the other, and back as needed. Perhaps the easiest way to think about this process is as a series of steps that you can move from one to the other and back again.
Attributions
The Writing Textbook by Josh Woods, editor, and contributor, as well as an unnamed author (by request from the original publisher), and other authors named separately is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
This chapter has additions, edits, and organization by James Charles Devlin.
