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This lesson and the ones that follow it will deal with creating, editing, and evaluating written work. Let’s begin by discussing the various stages of the writing process, with a focus on prewriting.
The process of creating written work can be broken down into five steps:
However, don’t expect to move through this sequence once and then be finished with your paper. Written works are not created with a straightforward and orderly technique.
Rather, writing is a recursive practice. It involves a series of iterations through the above steps, with each pass revealing a different component of the final work.
Oftentimes, for example, it is easier to write a paper’s introduction once the body of the work is complete. This is because the writer then has a more concrete grasp of the paper’s key points.
Similarly, in the course of exploring and analyzing a particular topic, writers often come across ideas and concepts they overlooked in their prewriting; incorporating these new ideas requires a new move through each stage.
Prewriting is the generation of ideas preliminary to formal writing. The purpose of prewriting is to come up with a large volume of ideas that you can use as raw material for your paper.
During prewriting, your focus should be on creating and keeping track of ideas. There’s no need to worry about which ideas are most relevant, innovative, or feasible. You can sharpen your focus later. During prewriting, you’re just hoping to jumpstart your thought process and begin honing in on a thesis.
Outlining is the creation of a structured plan for a piece of writing. The purpose of outlining is to select the best ideas you generated in your prewriting process and to organize them into the order in which you will present them in your paper.
Outlining helps you focus your inquiry and organize your paper. Making decisions about how to the order in which you will present information also imparts a better understanding of the logical relationship between the various components of your argument.
Composition is the actual construction of a piece of writing. The purpose of composition is to flesh out the ideas you’ve generated in greater detail and to complete an initial draft of your final work.
In addition to the substantive work of building your argument, composition also introduces a host of formal and stylistic concerns. Effective composition includes attention to details of grammar, sentence structure and variety, flow and readability, and research attribution.
Revision is the process of altering and modifying the substance of the argument in your paper. The purpose of revising is to streamline and tighten the arguments you make in support of your thesis. As you revise, you’ll pay attention to your essay’s organization and how well you’ve evidenced each of your key claims.
Editing is the process of reviewing your work to ensure that it comports with rules of formal English. The purpose of editing is to create clarity of writing and economy of expression. As you edit, you’ll pay attention to usage, grammar, and style.
Proofreading is the process of reading over a final draft of a written work to ensure that both the form and the content are of sufficient quality. The purpose of proofreading is to catch any errors you may have overlooked previously.
Each of the previous four stages introduced a new consideration into the writing process. Proofreading is your chance to go over your work with a proverbial fine-tooth comb and ensure that you have not overlooked anything.
Proofreading is the time to check for spelling errors your word processor’s spell-checker would not catch, such as substituting too for to, or read for red, and to scrutinize your grammar, mechanics, and style. You should also make sure that your arguments are tight and well organized.
Before we take a closer look at prewriting and outlining, let’s take a moment to review.
Which of the following activities would be appropriate to the composition phase of the writing process?
By bracketing out concern for anything other than generating ideas, good prewriting facilitates creativity and lateral thinking. Even though the process is designed to elicit free-flowing ideas, it’s important that prewriting have some structure. Otherwise, it can degenerate into unfocused daydreaming.
The best way to give structure to the prewriting process is to take notes on the ideas that are being generated. The following are some note-taking methods specific to the prewriting process that highlight the relationships between ideas and increase the likelihood of producing useful material.
Brainstorming is the process of generating ideas and information based on word associations.
Brainstorming involves generating a list of words, phrases, names, and anything else that comes to a writer’s mind when he or she thinks about the topic at hand.
During brainstorming, writers don’t need to worry about the utility of the items on their lists. Brainstormed lists serve as raw material for the writing process; the main goal is to think of as many ideas as possible.
After brainstorming a list, it’s helpful to go back through the list and try to group similar items together. After grouping the items, try to create a label for each group.
With the King Lear list above, a writer might end up with groups labeled “relationships,” “character flaws,” and “literary techniques.” Each of those headings gives the writer an idea for a larger idea his or her paper can explore.
Free-writing is an unstructured, associative form of writing that closely mirrors the process of brainstorming. The idea behind free-writing is to designate a period of time—say ten minutes—during which you won’t stop writing, even forcing yourself to continue when you feel like you have no ideas.
Like brainstorming, free-writing allows a writer to focus on generating ideas without worrying about style and grammar. There’s no need to censor ideas; the goal is to write whatever you’re thinking and sort it out later.
Once the designated period of time has elapsed, the writer can choose to read through the free-writing, select one or two of the best ideas and then free-write again on those specific topics. This process is called looping. Several rounds of looping can help writers narrow down their thinking to a usable thesis.
Heuristic is an adjective describing a device or technique used to guide an investigation or inquiry. Heuristic questioning is a prewriting process in which writers pose a series of questions whose answers are relevant to the topic of their writing.
After posing the questions, writers then jot down answers in an effort to clarify their thinking. If they are not able to answer one or more of the questions satisfactorily, they know where they need to focus their research.
Clustering explores the relationship between ideas by creating a map of concepts and their relationships to one another. Physically rendering the relationships between topics and ideas helps clarify thinking as well as reveal new directions for inquiry.
For instance, the beginning of a cluster map for a paper on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” might look something like this:
If you already know what your main topic or thesis is, you can put it in the circle that’s at the center of your cluster map and work outwards. If you don’t yet know your thesis, you can use the cluster map to get a sense of which topics are most important (Which circles have the most lines drawn to them?)
Each group of connected circles represents a larger topic that can become a paragraph in an essay or paper. Circles in a cluster map also can include questions that arise during the course of creating the map.