When we speak of the writing process, we are speaking of the writer’s unconscious and conscious creativity and the process that writing textbooks generally define structurally. This process is often treated as a linear one that, if followed step by step, will lead to a successfully written product. Although some writers may write this way, most devise their own ways of generating ideas and writing, usually from their own experiences of what works for them.
As we said in chapter 1, writing is a way of thinking. In other words, the quality of your writing depends on the quality of the thinking you do about your topic or your assignment. This chapter discusses the kinds of thinking you need to do before you begin writing, while you are writing your first draft, and when you are rewriting your draft.
The whole writing process can be divided into the prewriting, writing, and rewriting or revising phases. In the prewriting phase, you might try to clarify
Sometimes, these phases are quite distinct and separate, but for most students, they seldom have clear boundaries. They overlap in a recursive fashion rather than fall in place as an orderly sequence of steps, one neatly following from the other. When you work on longer research papers, you will generate ideas, gather information, plan your organization, and write your draft. You may later go back to revise it. When you write shorter assignments or essays, you may plan, write, and revise as you go along. In most cases, you may revise your plan, your organization, and your content on your way to the final draft.
Understanding that writing is individual and recursive, we can look at the three phases—prewriting, writing, rewriting—and some strategies you may use to write college assignments.
The purpose of prewriting is to generate an abundance of raw material and notes that will give you some strategies for writing your first draft. For most students, starting a draft too soon, without the results of the prewriting phase, leads to poorly constructed writing, often with weak generalities. Papers tend to reflect superficial treatment of the assignment. Prewriting is not an isolated event, but the way to look ahead to drafting and revising, enabling a piece of writing to grow.
Prewriting is a systematic thinking process that helps you probe what you will write. Prewriting techniques help you determine what rhetorical approach to take and how to plan for implementing it. Prewriting planning enables you to explore a topic from different perspectives, engage your imagination and creativity, discover original ideas, and perceive not-so-obvious relationships between and among ideas.
Prewriting
Your writing task begins when you receive your writing assignment from your teacher. The first step is to make sure you understand the assignment and what your teacher wants you to do with it. To do this, review the requirements of the assignment. These may be in the form of an assignment sheet or a description of the assignment, or they may be given to you verbally during a class lecture. Your requirements might also be stated as a one-line entry in your syllabus or as a short essay question. In any case, to understand your writing project, you should ask and answer the following kinds of questions:
Answering this last question is important because your answer determines the level of effort you put into the writing project. Not all writing projects warrant the same level of effort. For example, the thesis you write in your final year to satisfy a graduation requirement will probably require more time and attention and stricter adherence to a systematic writing process than a response you may write for a homework assignment. If you are not sure of the importance of individual assignments, ask your teacher.
To help you understand your writing assignment and decide what approach to take to write it, look for key phrases that reveal your teacher’s expectations. Table 2.1 shows you how to identify these expectations from the directive wording of the assignment. These key phrases are often associated with essay questions, as well as informal and formal papers. As a note, the table is based on Benjamin Bloom’s cognitive objectives.
Table 2.1
Assignment Wording and Expectations
Assignment uses the following
directive wording: |
When your teacher expects you
to do the following: |
|---|---|
| Define, label, list, name, repeat, order, arrange, memorize | Memorize, recall, and present information |
| Describe, indicate, restate, explain, review, summarize, classify | Interpret information in your own words |
| Apply, illustrate, prepare, solve, use, sketch, operate, practice, calculate | Apply knowledge to new situations |
| Analyze, categorize, compare, test, distinguish, examine, contrast | Break down knowledge into parts and show relationships among parts |
| Arrange, compose, formulate, organize, plan, assemble, construct | Bring together parts of knowledge to form a whole; build relationships for new situations |
| Appraise, evaluate, conclude, judge, predict, compare, score | Make judgments based on criteria; support, confirm preferences |
| Use supporting examples, cite passages from the text, paraphrase, summarize | Quote or paraphrase to support what you have written |
| Provide corroborating evidence, reference other works, research, cite examples from case studies | Use outside research to support your thesis or hypothesis |
Once you have understood your assignment and decided on what approach to take, you can move on to identifying and targeting your audience.
Prewriting
No matter what the writing project, you should plan to write to someone—that is, you should target an audience for your writing assignment. Audience analysis is crucial to understanding what should go into each piece of writing. You should consider your audience’s needs in your research; your content; the background information you provide; your tone, style, and wording; and the frequency with which you define terminology. Analyzing your audience will help you make the necessary decisions about what you will write.
Many students assume that the teacher is the primary audience for the writing. Although your teacher may be your audience for an essay, he or she may also expect you to write for your classmates or others in your field of study.
In addition to knowing who your audience is, you need to understand your purpose for writing. Writers always have a specific reason for writing, and purpose includes what the author intends to accomplish in the writing and how the author wants the reader to use the information. Purpose bridges the gap between audience and content, linking them inextricably to you, the writer.
Your purpose is not the same as your writing strategy. To analyze some concept is not, by itself, very interesting or meaningful. But to analyze a concept to look closely at its various parts so that you may gain new insight into what it means has both strength of purpose and meaning for the reader. In college writing, your purpose for writing is usually to explain something to your readers or to convince them of your way of thinking.
If you are unsure who the target audience is, discuss the issue with your teacher. Also, be aware of key words on your assignment sheet that will help you identify the intended audience, e.g., Write an analysis for others in your field, or Describe to the class.
To develop an audience profile, you need specific information about your audience, information about its understanding of and attitude toward your subject. Your teacher may guide you in learning what questions to ask to get the necessary information to profile your audience, or you may develop this list yourself. The following list, although not exhaustive, can help you do that. Be aware that your teacher or your particular writing assignment may require more information about your audience.
After you determine the nature of your audience and your purpose, you must determine how this information affects your planning and writing decisions. For example, the audience profile will tell you the following:
Some students prefer to answer these questions before they begin to write. Other students begin planning the writing and answer these questions later. Actually, this series of planning activities includes prewriting activities and perhaps some research. The goal of this phase of the writing process is to determine the scope of your writing project and to prepare to write your first draft.
We will now describe several prewriting techniques to help you get started.
Prewriting
Where do ideas come from? For most writers, writing is recursive, even messy. Writers step into the writing process wherever they can get a foothold to begin. How students develop their own writing process usually depends on their learning styles, personalities, and work habits.
Although everyone begins with the assignment, each writer engages the writing process at a different place and gets to the finished product by a somewhat different means—depending on the assignment, purpose, audience, and what the writer already knows about the subject matter. If you are a manager in the banking industry taking the capstone course in business management, you may be able to start with a thesis and an outline. If you are a first-year student with little writing experience, you might start with the prewriting questions about audience, purpose, and topic.
Although successful writers follow different paths that enable them to think about their writing, create and frame ideas, and draft and revise their writing, there are enduring and natural ways of apprehending writing.
Writers have used many different techniques to generate ideas and get started. These techniques can even overcome barriers to writing, known as writer's block. Writers can use these techniques at any point in their writing, not just at the beginning. When a writer runs out of ideas after a writing project is underway, these techniques can help him or her to get moving again.
Among several widely used techniques for probing a topic and teasing out various ideas for writing, here’s the best short set of techniques to fit a variety of thinking styles.
Prewriting
Techniques to Get Started
Systematic techniques, those that have a preconceived structure, often work well for students who like to observe and reflect on what they observe. These students, who like to analyze and organize, prefer to have their information in neat packages. They tend to like working with details and directions, following instructions, and ordering their information and work habits. Whatever your preferred style, you will benefit if you try something different to get you thinking in a new way. No matter what kind of student you are, try these different techniques to see what works to get you started.
You may recognize these classic strategies for getting started as ways to develop or organize an essay—definition, division and classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and process analysis. Using this strategy, you would thoughtfully answer a few questions using topics you might like to explore. As you write these answers and think about your topic, you can make brief notes. After reviewing your notes, you mark the ideas that seem promising. As an added bonus, each of these strategies suggests a logical way to organize your writing. You probably won’t use all of these strategies in one paper, but you might use one or two.
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Classic Strategies Answer these questions about your topic:
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The following example shows one way to use classic strategies to generate ideas:
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Example of the Classic Strategies Approach Topic: Effects of Pfiesteria pollution in the Chesapeake Bay
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Traditional Journalist’s Questions
Most students are familiar with the traditional journalist’s questions for gathering information—who, what, where, when, how, and why. Answering these questions about your topic will help to generate details and give you a context for writing about the topic you have selected.
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Traditional Journalist’s Questions Answer these questions about your topic:
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Here’s how you might use these questions to generate ideas and details about a topic.
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Example of Traditional Journalist’s Questions Topic: Effects of Pfiesteria pollution of the Chesapeake Bay
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Looking at your topic from multiple perspectives may give you unexpected ideas and details to pursue. When you are forced to look at your topic from multiple points of view, you see relationships that would not have occurred to you. This approach invites you to look at your topic as an entity, as a process or a part of a process, and as a system or part of a system. It also invites you to look at differences, variability, and prevalence.
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Multiple Perspectives Answer these questions about your topic:
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Here’s an example of some possible answers to our questions on the topic:
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Example of Using Multiple Perspectives Topic: Environmental pollution of the Chesapeake Bay What is its essence? Pfiesteria is a form of algae pollution? Bacteria? How would you describe it? How does the Pfiesteria pollution show itself? Can we tell before the fish start dying? Millions of dead fish? Algae-covered shorelines? Cloudy, smelly water? Causes a type of human dementia. How does it fit into a larger group or system? What other kinds of pollution are there in the bay? Does it pollute water primarily? What other algae does it compete with? How does it compare with others like it in the group? Is Pfiesteria the only deadly algae found there? How does it change over time, and how much does it change before it becomes something else? How long does it take for Pfiesteria to become deadly? Does it transmute? Is it ever not deadly? Has it changed over the years? Have the effects of the outbreak changed? How is it unique? Is Pfiesteria one of a kind or one of many strains? Why is this strain so deadly? Do all algae outbreaks affect humans? |
When you use these techniques and strategies for generating ideas about your topic, you can also include notes about how you will find your supporting evidence. For example, in our sample topic about Pfiesteria, you might check the Washington Post archives for the last year to find timely information about the most recent Pfiesteria outbreak or even visit the EPA Web page to see whether any information is available there. The Maryland Fish and Wildlife Department will also have information. It’s important to have some ideas about where you can go to get more details and perhaps even more ideas about how you want to treat your topic.
Prewriting
Techniques to Get Started
Intuitive techniques are often choices for writers who tend to discover information through concrete experiences and their own feelings. These techniques—brainstorming and webbing and chaining—appeal to students who don't always know where to begin and who are comfortable generating their own ideas and approaches. They tend to generate a lot of ideas and enjoy the process of discovery. Some students just work better when they are able to let their imaginations run free and express their idea associations.
Brainstorming enables a writer to find ideas that may be submerged in the mind, memory, and intuition. It's a form of free association in writing to stimulate a chain of ideas, a technique that teaches you how to think in writing. You can brainstorm with others or by yourself. In any case, when you brainstorm, you create a list of ideas and associations to help you think through your topic. In brainstorming:
When your time is up, take a break from your brainstorming for a few minutes. When you return to your list, circle the ideas or phrases that interest you or that suggest something you might like to pursue. This preliminary list can give you key phrases, words, and ideas for still another brainstorming session. The more you brainstorm, the more material you will generate for your writer’s mind. You can brainstorm until you are satisfied that you have the ideas you want to work with.
When your brainstorming session is over, you can then consciously begin analyzing and organizing your ideas. Circle the ideas that might be related and that might interest you. Can you organize these into a topic for your writing assignment? You can even try freewriting to form some good ideas for your assignment.
An added benefit of brainstorming is that you are bringing your own personal perspective, knowledge, memory, and creativity to your writing assignment. When you work from your own viewpoint, you are more likely to generate original material.
Webbing and chaining are very similar, using the free association of ideas discovered in a visual kind of way. Begin webbing by putting your topic idea in the center and drawing radiating lines out from it. At the end of each of these lines, or rays, write down all the ideas that occur to you. Brainstorm for a period of time, such as two minutes, and generate several different ideas.
Then choose one or more of these branched ideas and do the same for it, generating more ideas. An example of webbing might look like this.
Figure 2.1
Webbing Ideas
Chaining is a bit more structured. Start by placing your idea inside a box and then draw arrows from that box to another box, in which you write an idea that occurs to you. Each additional box may then logically suggest another idea to you. An example of chaining might look this.
Figure
2.2
Chaining Ideas
Many writers keep a journal in which they brainstorm ideas or even freewrite for future use. In fact, keeping a journal is a very old technique writers have used to practice thinking in writing and to keep records of what they learn. Journals can be repositories of seeds of ideas for writing assignments in any class and a place to practice thinking in writing. If you struggle to think of ideas in different classes, keep a journal from the start of the class. In the back, designate a section for recording your ideas, thoughts, and possible topics for papers.
Many students resist keeping journals because they seem like a lot more work. The rewards are generous, however, when you are stuck for an idea for a paper and succeed at mining your journal for just the right topic.
Prewriting
Techniques to Get Started
Some students use only the outlining technique to get started in their writing. Formal outlining, which often results from organized lists, is a highly analytical technique that assumes the writer knows already the how, what, where, when, why, and who aspects of the topic. For an outline to be effective, the writer must also have some ideas about the writing strategy to use for the assignment. Many writers can combine their brainstorming and freewriting results and come up with a tentative, or informal, outline of their topics. Other writers may start with lists of ideas, organized into related topics, and create a general informal outline of the subject matter.
Many writers in the prewriting phase use grocery lists of topics, loosely organized into some sequence that seems to make sense. This grocery list often is enough to get the writer started with ideas and an organizational structure.
At some point, you will have to stop generating ideas and answers to questions and begin organizing all your notes and raw material. You will have to decide how to order your material and to shape your draft to meet your needs. There is no clear-cut place to stop prewriting activities and begin drafting; the prewriting, writing, and revising do not follow a strict linear sequence. You might need to return to idea generation when you are writing your first draft or even reorganize your thoughts a few times until you discover the best way for you.
If you have tried these techniques to generate ideas and get started, you now have several pages of information for the next step. You have at least one major idea on which to write, an articulated sense of your interest in the topic, an accounting of what you already know, and some ideas for how to find more information. Add to this substantial start your audience analysis, and you are ready to begin drafting.
Prewriting
Doing exploratory research is included here with the prewriting techniques because library research often is a way to generate ideas. As you review the literature on a subject or read in a particular area, you may note ideas that will help you get started with the writing.
We also describe research here because of its part in the transition from prewriting to writing. If you decide that research is needed, you should begin it before you create the final version of a thesis and write an outline. Often, research provides information that can help you formulate a thesis or controlling idea. Research can also give you good ideas for brainstorming, freewriting, and keeping a journal, all techniques, as you know, that will help you overcome barriers to writing. Many times, what you learn from course materials is not enough for formulating a controlling idea. You often have to do some research just to be able to articulate an opinion.
For example, in a technology management course, you may learn that the average time for completing an engineering project is two years. To encourage critical analysis, your teacher may offer examples that both prove and dispute this claim. Your writing assignment may be to propose several methods for shortening the average time. You realize that research will be needed, first, to confirm the average development time, and, second, to discover methods for shortening this time. From your research, you will eventually be able to propose several methods for shortening the time, based on case studies you uncover and even interviews you have with project engineers.
To learn more about research, refer to chapter 4 "The Research Process," chapter 5, "Academic Integrity and Documentation," and chapter 6, "Using Library Resources in Research and Writing."
Thesis Statement and Controlling Idea
After you have begun the research and decided on your subject, the next step in the planning process is to determine your working thesis. A thesis statement states the purpose and topic of your writing, and the controlling idea indicates the direction and, often, the writing strategy you will adopt. Your thesis statement will often be based on your synthesis of the information you have gathered from class, from your experience, and from research. This early in your writing, your thesis statement is really a working thesis that you use to begin thinking about your topic. You may revise this thesis many times before you are finished thinking and ready to write your final draft.
Some students struggle with how to write a thesis statement and how to use it in their writing. Your thesis statement may take its shape from different ways of weaving your material and thoughts together. Although you may devise a unique way that works well for you, there are three methods that seem to work for many students.
The first method is simply to restate the assignment in your own words. Restating the assignment often helps you understand it better and gives you a point at which to begin writing. Table 2.1 can help you with this method and others. Restating enables you to articulate your point of view and write what you know and how you think about your assignment topic.
The next method works when you have researched your topic first. Simply sum up what your research has led you to believe or what you think it means. This method helps you start organizing your thoughts as you look to your research to support your thesis.
The third method works for students who like to jump into the writing with only minimal preliminary organizing and planning. Think of your topic as a question, and write your assignment as though you are answering it. As you line up your supporting statements, you will discover what you want to write. Your thesis should suggest to you an organization for your ideas and often will show you areas where you need to study or read more.
If you are a first-year student for whom college writing is a new experience, your thesis statement may be simple. Your teacher may ask you to write a few paragraphs on a simple topic to demonstrate learning in your course work. For example, after reading about illuminated manuscripts in an art history class, you might be asked to discuss any modern application of illumination. Your thesis statement might look like the one here.
We can see the techniques of illuminated manuscripts
on the World Wide Web pages of the Internet today. |
In another example from a humanities class, your American history teacher might ask you to reflect on the clash of cultures in precolonial America. Your thesis might look like this one.
When Columbus came to the New World, he brought disease,
guns, and a new religion to the native peoples he found there. |
Clearly, to meet the expectations of these shorter writing assignments, your working thesis statement must synthesize information you are learning.
The thesis statement for a more formal research writing assignment might resemble the following, written for a research paper for a capstone course in business management. This thesis statement suggests that the writing will be more analytical and that the author will synthesize the results of the analysis.
The "data model" is a powerful tool for management
feedback and strategic planning. |
This more complex thesis statement will likely undergo many iterations as the student synthesizes the concepts learned and looks for applications. He or she will also narrow the topic to a manageable size to meet the expectations stated in the assignment and reflect the desired level of learning.
Some examples of other kinds of thesis statements are listed here, along with some possible writing strategies they suggest. Keep in mind that you may develop strategies other than those suggested here.
Table
2.2
Relating the Thesis Statement to a Writing Strategy
| Thesis Statement | Possible Writing Strategy |
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Analysis with definition, application, and examples |
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Synthesis with some division/classification and causal analysis |
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Synthesis with definition and application |
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Analysis with comparison and contrast; evaluation |
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Cause and effect, comparison, synthesis |
Many writers use a checklist to evaluate the appropriateness of their chosen thesis statement. Sometimes it’s a good idea to have someone else read your thesis statement and give you feedback. Your thesis statement is effective if you can answer yes to these questions.
Once you have a working thesis statement, what do you do with it? Your clearly stated thesis should suggest to you some ideas for organizing your information, so now may be a good time to discuss outlining. If you can’t think of how to organize your essay at this point, you can always use one of the techniques mentioned for getting started, such as the journalist’s questions, brainstorming, or freewriting.
Writing
Your planning outline will probably be informal at first as you think in writing and organize your thoughts. As with your thesis, you may revise your outline many times before you are ready to draft your paper, as you gain knowledge of your topic and make decisions about how to organize the information for your audience. In fact, some teachers may even require you to create a planning outline of your paper first and submit it for review.
Outlining is just another way to organize your ideas and can be used at every stage of the writing process. Outlining, especially in the planning stages, may be informal, a scratch list of points you want to make. Ideas are often simply jotted down in an order that appears to make sense to the writer in thinking about the topic. At a more developed stage, an outline may expand on several aspects of the thesis and controlling idea.
A formal outline, on the other hand, may contain complete sentences that expand the major and minor supporting statements for the clearly delineated thesis statement. How formal and detailed your outline is depends on the demands of the writing task and what kind of writer you are.
To summarize, outlining can help you plan and manage your writing assignment in several ways:
When you can see all the main information items in your writing project, you can then plan your research and writing schedule.
Writing
Getting From Notes To Your Draft
Every writer’s habits and ways of thinking differ. As you begin your first draft, you will find yourself cycling through four basic activities:
You may even go back to your prewriting idea-generating phase to generate more ideas or even read for more information. You may experiment with different statements of your thesis, and you certainly may try more than one way to organize your ideas before you finish your first draft. As you weave the threads of your ideas and notes into the whole cloth of your first draft, you will be sorting through all you have gathered in search of patterns that will shape your writing.
Start with your working thesis. As your writing flows from the thesis statement with its controlling idea, the subsequent paragraphs provide the information identified in your lists and notes.
As you write, you may want to provide concrete examples and support for what you say. If you are writing an essay, the support may be from the course lectures, excerpts from a text you studied, or examples from your experience that substantiate the points you want to make. If you are writing a formal research paper, this support may be citations from other writers and experts.
A first draft, your initial attempt to organize your thoughts in prose writing, is more complete than an outline and elaborates your ideas in complete sentences and paragraphs. From your thesis statement and notes, you should write at least one draft. For now, disregard spelling, punctuation, and grammar, which are writing mechanics. In this draft, you want to focus on getting your ideas down in a way that reflects your outline and your proposed plan. Focus on the content.
As you write, you will discover ways to improve your content and even your writing plan. You may decide to move, delete, or add sections. In other words, you will find that your first draft is another stage of thinking in writing. As you refine your ideas about your writing project, keep in mind that too many changes will impede your progress; if the change seems worthwhile, however, don’t hesitate to change direction.
In the example provided here, you can see how this writer began putting words on paper by starting with a controlling idea and adding additional support.
Example from a Student Response to an Essay Question Managing technical staff in today’s work environment challenges managers to provide a structured workplace, where tools workers use and the methods they follow are clearly defined and available. At the same time, technical management must also allow for individual expression and creativity. As the textbook, Managing for the Twenty-First Century, indicates, this challenge requires managers to walk a fine line within the often-competing roles of facilitator, fan, and disciplinarian. One concrete example of this challenge can be seen among software development managers. In software development environments, the manager must make technical decisions about tools and methods in fast-changing technical areas. He or she must be an expert in many complex systems just to ensure that the environment for work will generate productivity. The manager must also be able to assess contributions to a software project and discipline those who fail to contribute. Among software development groups, this task is especially challenging for managers because of the collaborative nature of the work and the interrelatedness of each person’s contribution to the total system. |
Freewriting and summarizing, two useful techniques for generating ideas, can help you get your ideas down on paper.
Writing
Getting From Notes To Your Draft
Freewriting is writing to think. Like brainstorming, freewriting taps into your inner resources to find your individual perspective, knowledge, memory, and intuition.
To begin freewriting, choose a set time for the activity, such as 20 or 30 minutes. Have plenty of paper available or start with a blank screen on your computer. If you get blocked when you write, try writing with your computer monitor turned off. Select a sentence or idea suggested by your brainstorming session and write that sentence at the top of the page. Begin writing and don’t stop. Don’t evaluate what you are writing as you write, and don’t worry about the mechanics of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Just write. Your goal is to think in writing about your topic.
Your writing may be more productive if you use some kind of framework for this process. One such framework might be to ask yourself questions about your topic and answer them. For example, you can start with the question What interests me about this topic? When you exhaust that question, then ask What do I already know about this topic? Is my knowledge from experience, previous research, or another class? Go on to answer the question, Where can I get more information on this topic?
When you are finished with the freewriting, you can evaluate what you have written for its usefulness. Circle ideas and directions that interest you. If you are using your computer, you can highlight the text you want to keep, block it and move it to another page, or delete what you want. You can also use the material you have written as a starting point for an outline.
Writing
Getting From Notes To Your Draft
Some students can get their writing started by briefly summarizing what they want to accomplish. For example, summarizing your idea might produce a statement such as the one presented here.
I want
to show how today's World Wide Web home pages—cite at least five
different examples of this—use many of the visual techniques of manuscript
illumination—do I want to use Byzantine, medieval, or baroque illumination
techniques for examples? |
Because a first draft is just that, a first draft, there is a close relationship between writing it and revising what you write. If you have received feedback from others about this draft, the first thing you will want to do before revising is to evaluate these comments. Be skeptical of evaluators who say that your writing is perfect, but, at the same time, beware of evaluators who seem overly critical in unproductive ways. Not all comments will be equally valuable or relevant. You should plan to implement only those that will improve your writing, paying special attention to any comments you might have received from your teacher.
Rewriting
A writer seeks feedback to begin the revising process. Once you have a draft on paper, you can get feedback from others on whether you have met your stated goals and whether what you have written is suitable. Although many students are reluctant to take the time to get feedback, getting an objective opinion about your draft gives you valuable information you can use in revision. A way to get especially valuable feedback is to give your teacher, classmates, or even your work colleagues a checklist of items you particularly want feedback on.
You may use a checklist similar to the one presented here to solicit specific feedback in particular areas or a modified, shorter list.
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Checklist for Feedback on Your Writing Assignments
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As you develop as a writer, you will adopt a positive attitude toward feedback and solicit it whenever possible. Three ways of gaining feedback are
Getting feedback is a precursor to revising your draft, which you may do several times. The comments of others and your own assessment of your work can become the basis for your revision.
Rewriting
Practically speaking, it is a challenge for a writer to be a good editor or proofreader of his or her own writing, but these are useful skills to learn. When you move from writing to editing, you need to approach your manuscript with a fresh eye and an objective interest. Proofreading, which you will do many times, calls for you to compare your original text with the corrected text to catch any changes you missed or made incorrectly. Editing requires that you perform a more complex check of your work, evaluating its content, organization, and style. Editing requires analysis and judgment to help you make decisions about organization and style. In editing, you review systematically certain features of your writing:
To begin editing, print a double- or triple-spaced copy of your paper. Take a top-down approach and review the general organization and content of your writing. Don’t focus on sentence-level editing yet. If you need to rearrange the paragraphs and sections, this is the time to do so. To get a clearer look at how your document is organized, write down your headings or use the document map feature of your word processor to view them. If your paper doesn’t have headings, then use your topic sentences. You can easily make a list of topic sentences by using your word processing function of blocking to copy them to a blank page. Check to see whether these sentences are related directly to your thesis statement and controlling idea. You can add, delete, and move text around to suit your ideas about content and organization.
You will need more than one pass through your paper. Once you have the organization and content the way you like it, you can pay closer attention to the style. Polish your sentences so they flow logically with your ideas. Check for clear transitions between ideas and paragraphs. Be sure your paragraphs and sentences are consistent and correct and your vocabulary and diction appropriate. Ensure that the mechanics are clean—no punctuation, spelling, or style convention errors.
A good way to improve your chances of being a good self-critic is to follow a personalized checklist each time you review your own work. You can write it to reflect what you already know about your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, or you can develop a checklist that will work generally for your writing.
Checklist for Personal Revision
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On the checklist, include fundamentals as well as reminders to check the substance of what you are saying and whether you followed the instructions. If you do not remember what some of the items on this checklist mean, refer to a grammar handbook or other writer’s reference.
Rewriting
In addition to the personal revision checklist, you may want to create a revision strategy based on the amount of time you have to revise and what your paper is likely to need. A revision strategy is a systematic process to review and evaluate your writing before you actually begin revising. You can use the Checklist for Personal Revision to guide your revision strategy or develop a checklist of your own that incorporates a revising schedule.
For example, if you are expecting to receive comments from peer reviewers a week before the paper is due, and you also know that the paper includes many typographical errors (typos) and mechanical errors, you may want to correct those while the paper is out for review. Of course, you will have to go over the paper once you have incorporated comments to catch any errors you may have added, but starting the revision process early will probably prove beneficial as you move closer to your due date.
Your revision strategy should be closely linked to the writing schedule for your project. The overall success of your revision effort will depend on how closely you have followed this schedule up to the point where revision can occur. Even when your time is limited, you should always try to leave some time for revision. On the whole, papers that are revised before submission receive better grades than those that are not.
Rewriting
The final draft is what you will hand in as the completed paper. If you are writing an examination, the final draft may be your handwritten answers once you have had a chance to read over them quickly and make corrections. If you are writing under other circumstances, you will have more time to produce a final draft, so it will probably look more finished and formal.
By the time you write the final draft, your writing should look fairly polished. Choppy sentences, poor or nonexistent transitions between paragraphs, grammar and spelling errors, and other characteristics of a first draft should all disappear. In addition, your final draft should incorporate comments you have received as well as changes you want to make based on your own evaluation.
Before you turn in your final draft, you should read what you have written all the way through at least once more. If you find something wrong with your paper at the last minute, attempt to correct it before you hand it in. Check with your teacher before making minor corrections with a black pen on the final paper. If your paper has too many corrections, you know it needs another revision.
At this point, you can use the following assessment checklist for your final draft. This checklist is briefer than the previous assessment during the drafting phase. You may, however, use either one to your benefit. Here, your evaluation should determine how well your writing assignment achieved its purposes.
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Checklist for Your Final Draft Content: Is the assignment complete? Is the information appropriate? Organization:Is the order of the information logical? Are the introduction and conclusion clear and related? Style: Are the style and tone appropriate? Are the sentences smooth and efficient? Is the diction appropriate, concrete, and accurate? Is the paper free from mechanical errors? Format: Is the assignment in the required format? |
When your answers to all of these questions are a confident yes, your final draft is ready to hand in.
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