The Writing Process
- What Is a Writing Process?
- Why Should We Study the Writing Process?
- What Shapes our Writing Processes?
- What Are Situational Variables?
- How and Why Do We Write?
- Sample Assignments and Activities
What is the Writing Process?
By Kimberly Smith and Dan Martin
Whether you’re writing a term paper or a text message, you will inevitably use a writing process of some kind. That process may be long or short, simple or complex, easy or arduous, but all the little actions you take—from daydreaming about your topic to rearranging paragraphs—help bring a new text into the world. In writing studies, scholars use the term writing process to refer to the steps a writer takes while composing. As a writer, you engage with the writing process every time you put pen to paper or start typing in a word processor. Often, the writing process may begin even earlier, when you read an assignment description, assess the rhetorical situation, and begin to generate ideas.
In the past, you may have been taught that the writing process is made up of a series of stages that a writer, usually a student, goes through in order to produce a polished essay. Here’s an example of a typical writing process sequence taught in high schools:
- Planning: The writer generates ideas, picks a topic or argument, collects research or evidence, and plans their paper, sometimes mentally and sometimes using a method such as outlining or idea mapping.
- Drafting: The writer makes a serious attempt at writing, producing a draft that more or less resembles the finished product.
- Revising: The writer makes substantial changes to the content or organization of the piece of writing, using feedback from others or their own judgment as guidance.
- Editing: The writer makes surface-level changes to a piece of writing. Editing may include addressing punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, grammatical and mechanical readability.
- Brainstorming: The writer spends time thinking about their ideas or topics that interst them. Invention and brainstorming are important parts of the writing process that may occur before planning or at any stage during the process. Exploring your ideas and insights before you create a focus and question to engage helps you work through those ideas and to shape them before committing to a focus.
- Discussing: The writer spends time discussing their ideas and writing with their classmates and instructor to obtain ideas and formative feedback that can help students develop their writing.
- Peer-Reviewing: The writer will produce late stage drafts and participate in a peer reviewing session to learn more about evaluating writing and to recieve formative feedback on a late stage draft.
- Feedback: The writer will provide and recieve formative feedback on their writing projects. Writers need formative feedback to make revisions and to develop their ideas.
- Incubation: The writer needs time away from their writing to think about their ideas and their writing.
- Situational Variables: The writer needs to account for variables like time constraints, word count, and assignment requirements to manage their writing.
Planning, drafting, revising, and editing are all important parts of writing, and you’ll hear your instructor use these terms often. Contrary to popular belief, however, these activities are not confined to distinct stages that come one after the other, nor are they the only components of a writing process. In fact, the linear writing process you may be familiar with is not a very realistic depiction of what the act of writing involves, for students or professional writers. This is because the writing process is recursive, which means that writers move back and forth between different steps as a piece of writing evolves.
You can think of the different parts of the writing process—including the steps in the sequence above—as tools that you can use to craft texts in a variety of situations. Writing process applies to more than just schoolwork. While you might occasionally move between “stages” of the writing process in a linear fashion, you’ll likely find it more helpful to take a flexible approach, going back to certain parts of the writing process, or skipping ahead, as needed. For example, you may decide to spend some more time planning after receiving feedback on a first draft. The recursive nature of the writing process means that all your efforts contribute to forward progress, even if it feels like you’re going backwards sometimes.
When we break away from the idea of the linear writing process and instead view writing as recursive, we begin to see how writing can look different for different people in different contexts. Successful writers tend to tailor their writing processes to the circumstances. In other words, they spend more or less time in certain stages and use different strategies depending on what they’re writing, who they’re writing it for, and the practical constraints they’re forced to juggle. Even if you haven’t realized it, you probably adapt your writing process already. You might spend a fair amount of time editing and proofreading your resume and cover letter before submitting a job application, but you probably don’t feel the need to check for grammar errors when you’re sending a text to a close friend, for example.
Even when responding to the exact same rhetorical situation, different writers may approach writing differently. A number of factors can shape an individual’s writing process, including personal preference. As you learn more about the writing process, I encourage you to think about how you prefer to write. What aspects of your writing process work well for you? Do you have any writing habits that make it difficult to create a text you’re satisfied with? The point is not to find one correct way to write but understand the strategies that help you write effectively. The more you know about your own writing process—and writing process in general—the easier it will be to get words on the page.
Teaching writing as a process allows us to value the many different language practices students bring into the classroom. Writing is not a linear processes. This course will ask you to examine your writing process and to learn what revision is and how to do it. How can I reach my audience more clearly? Where are my ideas unclear and underdeveloped? How can I develop those ideas? What needs to be done to make those ideas more developed? What ideas are unclear? Why are they unclear? These are questions writers use to help them make revisions because they understand that writing requires extensive revision.
The differences between how we speak and write can “depend on factors such as genre, context, register, topic, level of formality, and purpose as much as whether the passage is spoken or written” (Rose, p. 373). An inability to create a piece of writing in a particular way is more about experience doing that kind of writing than a cognitive deficiency.
Why Should We Study the Writing Process?
By Kimberly Smith and Dan Martin
Writing holds an important place in our society. The ability to write well conveys status, which you surely know if you’ve ever received a grade on a paper. More importantly, though, writing allows us to advocate for ourselves, communicate vital information, and participate in conversations about what’s best for our communities and our world. Most students want to improve their writing, but how can you improve as a writer if everyone seems to have different ideas about what makes writing good? Studying the writing process offers one answer. To understand how studying the writing process could help you grow as a writer, think about a time when you struggled with a writing assignment. What did your process look like while working on the assignment? Did you wait until the last minute to get started and barely meet the deadline after rushing to get something on paper? Did you spend hours outlining and drafting before realizing you had misunderstood the teacher’s instructions? These are common frustrations experienced by students and professional writers alike. Now, if you can, think of a time when you felt proud of something you’d written. Did your process look different? Learning to identify strategies that have helped you write efficiently and effectively enables you to replicate them.
Studying the writing process can also make writing tasks feel more approachable. Whether or not you consider yourself a strong writer, you’ve probably felt intimidated by a writing task at some point in your life. Maybe you gave yourself plenty of time to write but felt your mind freeze every time you put your hands on the keyboard—you have all your notes in front of you and you still don’t know what to write. In this situation, it’s helpful to understand exactly what scholars mean when they say that writing is a process. There are two contrasting ways of thinking about writing. In the product-centered view, which was dominant until the mid-20th century, writing is imagined to be a process of transcription in which the writer transfers their ideas from their brain onto the page. If you write from a product-centered perspective, you might feel pressure to complete a paper in one sitting and get every sentence just right the first time. This can make beginning to write incredibly difficult, since most of us don’t know exactly what we want to say or how we want to say it right away.
A process-centered view of writing adopts more realistic expectations. Scholars who encourage students to think about writing as a process understand that strong texts are created gradually like statues carved out of marble, not instantly conjured in an ideal form like 3D-printed collectables. Although you may use writing to communicate ideas, writing isn’t really a process of transcription at all; it’s a process of discovery. As writing process expert Donald Murray says, “Writers find their writing alive under their pens. What they have to say is continually evolving beneath the hand” (57). What Murray means is that you learn more about what you have to say through the act of writing. If writing is an act of learning rather than a demonstration of already acquired knowledge, as the process-centered view suggests, you don’t have to worry about making your first draft perfect. Good first drafts can and do change dramatically as writers work their way through the writing processes. Feel free to experiment and make a mess. You can always clean it up later. As writers, we often have to figure out what we’re trying to say before we can decide on the best way to say it. Ultimately, there are many good reasons to study the writing process. It can enable you to write more efficiently. It can help you develop reliable strategies for tackling different writing tasks. It can even make writing in new or high-stakes contexts feel less anxiety-inducing. There’s lots more to learn about the writing process, but the most important thing to remember is simply that writing is a process. When you remember this, you give yourself the freedom to try and fail and try again—in other words, to learn.
What shapes our writing processes?
What Socio-cultural Factors Shape Our Writing Processes? We’ve already discussed how a product-centered versus process-centered view of writing can impact a person’s writing process, but you might still be wondering what causes people to take these perspectives on writing. Beyond that, you might wonder how individuals learn all the small habits and patterns that make up their writing processes. We can begin to answer these questions by examining the societies and cultures writers operate within. Sociocultural factors significantly impact how individuals think and behave. This is true in writing as much as in other domains. What is the first descriptive word that comes to mind when you think about writing as an activity or profession? If you’re like many students you might have thought of words like boring or pretentious. On the other hand, you might have a completely different idea of writing, one that aligns with words like creative, important, or intelligent. Writing can be all these things and more, but that’s not the point. The beliefs we have about writing may seem natural to us, but they are not universal, and they do not come from nowhere.
First, our writing processes are shaped by the dominant cultural attitudes in our society. According to Dustin Edwards and Enrique Paz, it’s common for people in the United States to romanticize authorship and view authors as geniuses who are able to write easily with little to no help from others. Can you see how this popular understanding of what it means to be a writer might discourage a student from writing a second draft of a paper or seeking feedback from a peer? If you believe that good writers produce texts alone and without difficulty, it’s easy to assume that struggling to write something perfectly in one go makes you an inherently bad writer. If you believed you were a bad writer, why would writing a second draft make any difference? This is an example of how cultural attitudes about writing can influence our writing processes without our conscious knowledge. Thankfully, in this case, American society’s perception of writers as genius individualists does not have basis in reality. Even the most respected authors struggle to write their so-called masterpieces, producing many drafts and receiving tons of feedback and assistance from editors, publishers, and mentors along the way.
Even when cultural attitudes do not specifically involve writing, they can still impact the writing process. In the U.S., social stigma surrounding failure may make some writers hesitant to experiment and take risks, even in early drafts. As a second example, in Vietnam, cultural attitudes about what makes for respectful social interaction mean students are unlikely to ask a teacher to read an unfinished draft of their writing as part of the writing process (Graham and Rijlaarsdam 782). Writing plays a significant role in culture, and as a result, culture shapes the writing process. Finally, it’s important to note that the practical realities of people’s lives also impact how they write. Whether or not you buy into specific cultural attitudes about writing, you’ll still learn the version of the writing process taught to you in the specific school you attend. Likewise, if you have access to a computer and the internet, your writing process might look very different from the process of someone who only has paper and a pencil. The amount of free time you have can similarly impact writing process. If you have to work a full-time job while attending college, for example, you might struggle to find time to write more than one or two drafts of a paper, even if you know another round of revision would improve the final product. Resources aren’t distributed equally within societies, so writing processes can vary dramatically, even between individuals with the same cultural attitudes about writing.When you think about the different sociocultural factors that have impacted your own writing process, you might discover perspectives that help or hinder you. While you may choose to accept or reject any of the attitudes you uncover, examining where those attitudes came from and thinking about them critically will help you understand who you are as a writer.
The WPA asserts that:
“Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects. Composing processes are seldom linear: a writer may research a topic before drafting, then conduct additional research while revising or after consulting a colleague. Composing processes are also flexible: successful writers can adapt their composing processes to different contexts and occasions. By the end of first-year composition, students should develop a writing project through multiple drafts. Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaborating, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing. Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas. Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes. Learn to give and to act on productive feedback to works in progress. Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities. Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work."
Students will learn that writing is a complex and highly recursive process and recognize how writers adapt language, genres, and formats for various audiences and purposes. Students will practice planning, drafting, revising, arranging, peer-editing, and self-editing their writing.
What Do We Need to Know about the Writing Process?
What are Situational Variables? Take a moment and think about the last writing assignment you completed. If the instructor had given you more time or if you’d been more interested in the topic, do you think the writing process would have been easier or more enjoyable? Would it have changed how you approached the task? In research, situational variables are factors which have the potential to impact a study’s results. When we talk about situational variables in a writing context, we’re referring to situation-specific factors that shape the writing process and the quality of the writing produced. In other words, situational variables are all the little things that make each writing situation unique. For most writers, situational variables play a significant role in shaping the writing process. These variables can include everything from how you feel at the time of writing to where you decide to work on the assignment. Although it would be impossible to list all the potential variables you might encounter, here are a few categories that apply to almost all writing situations:
- Genre: Do you have experience with the genre? How much do you enjoy writing in the genre? Do you understand the conventions of the genre or have access to examples?
- Environment: Where are you writing? Is the location comfortable? How noisy is the environment? Are there other people nearby or are you alone?
- Time of day: How tired are you when you’re writing? Do you feel rushed by another upcoming obligation or do you have plenty of time? What were you doing before writing?
- Modality: Are you writing on paper or using a computer? If you’re working on a computer, what software are you using? Do you have access to the internet?
- Mood: How are you feeling while writing? Are you hungry, thirsty, or otherwise uncomfortable? How do you feel about the subject you’re writing about? What’s happening in your personal life at the time of writing?
Notice how situational variables are not necessarily limited to factors imposed by the writing assignment itself. Writers aren’t robots—at least, not yet. You may wish that you could develop a writing process 100% guaranteed to work every time, but in reality, that’s just not possible. We’re all humans, and the particularities of our lives often interfere with composing. Some days, you just won’t feel up to writing or other variables will get in the way. That’s why it’s a good idea to give yourself plenty of time to complete your writing assignments. When the deadline is bearing down, though, you should also be prepared to adapt your writing process to accommodate the situation. As you can see, situational variables are central to the writing process. No two writing situations are alike, so it’s important to evaluate the situation and variables involved before writing. As you become more familiar with which situational variables impact your writing process negatively, you can begin to eliminate them or find strategies to work around them.
How and Why Do We Write?
How and Why Do We Write? Whenever you write, you will have a purpose for writing. That purpose might be to communicate information, to persuade someone of a position, or to simply get a passing grade on an assignment. No matter what reason you have for writing, your purpose will almost always play a role in the decisions you make while writing. As an example of how purpose and the way we write are intertwined, let’s think about the process of completing a job application. When applying for a job you want, the purpose is usually to persuade the person or computer reviewing your application that you’re the best candidate for the position. Even if the job listing doesn’t specify everything your application should include, you’re probably familiar with two genres that fit the purpose—the cover letter and the resume. A genre is a type of writing with established conventions and expectations. The resume genre, for example, typically includes information about your education, past work experience, and skills written in a format that’s neat and easy to skim. Since your purpose in writing is to land a great new job and the resume genre is designed with that purpose in mind, you’ll probably choose to include a resume with your application. The connection between how and why we write goes deeper than which genres we choose to employ, however. Depending on your purpose, you may find yourself tailoring your writing—and therefore your writing process—to the audience’s needs and wants. If you’re applying for an internship at a law firm with a straightlaced reputation, you’ll probably need to adhere closely to resume and cover letter genre conventions. Additionally, you may need to spend extra time proofreading for typos, making your language more formal, and ensuring you’ve used legal jargon correctly. On the other hand, what if you’re applying to work at a hip tech startup that claims to value creativity, ingenuity, and a sense of humor? In this case, you might decide to present the information you would normally include in a traditional resume and cover letter in a well-edited video that allows you to showcase your personality and inventiveness. Such a decision might be risky, but if the audience values risk-taking and creativity, it could also be highly persuasive. In this way, both purpose and audience can significantly impact how you choose to present information and the steps you take while writing.
Let’s make this illustration even clearer. Compare the type of writing you do while applying for a job to the type of writing you do while writing in a diary. For most people, the purpose of a diary is not to persuade anyone of anything; rather, you probably write in a diary or journal to express yourself, rant about your day, or record events so you can look back on them in the future. You are your primary audience when writing in a diary, so you don’t need to worry about how formal your language is or how organized the entries are. In fact, you may even prefer for a diary entry to be as unfiltered as possible. As a result, you probably won’t spend time editing your writing or correcting your spelling, and you almost certainly won’t revise your entries after completing them—unless, of course, you’re hoping to have them published, in which case, your purpose in writing shifts. The experience you have writing in a genre can also impact your writing process. If you’ve written dozens of scholarship applications before, you might be confident enough to start writing without planning or to make only minimal revisions to what you produce. If you’ve never written a scholarship application before, however, you might need to budget more time to come up with a strategy and to write multiple drafts. Before landing the job that allowed me to help write this textbook, my job sometimes involved writing the same product description over and over—only for different sizes, quantities, or colors of a product. When writing the first few descriptions, I would need to generate ideas, mess around with the organization of an outline, and even make some substantial changes after drafting. Once I got to the tenth or eleventh product description, however, I could write the whole thing with my eyes closed and still only need to make a few changes while editing.
Even the way you feel about the type of writing you’re doing can impact your process. If you’ve been assigned to write a paper on a subject you hate, you might decide to do the bare minimum of revising and editing in order to get a passing grade. On the other hand, if you’re writing on a subject you care about deeply, you might have so much fun researching and writing the paper that you write four or five drafts before you even start to think about turning it in. The point is not that you should seek to cut corners when writing things you hate or in genres you’re familiar with. Instead, the point in understanding the connection between what we write and how we write is to know when you need to adapt your writing process. Depending on your purpose for writing and the audience’s expectations, you may decide to spend more or less time on parts of the writing process. And when you understand what your process typically looks like when writing in different genres, you can budget your time and energy accordingly, which will help you meet deadlines both in college and beyond.
When and Where Do We Write, and How Does That Affect Our Writing? Busy college students often find themselves writing at unusual times and places. While your writing instructor wouldn’t recommend it, pulling an all-nighter to finish an assignment is not unheard of on many college campuses. Even if you set aside plenty of time to sleep, you still might need to write at a variety of times and locations—early in the morning in your dorm room, in between classes at the student union building, at the family dining table after dinner, or maybe even late at night in the quietest room at a raging house party. Time and place are two situational variables people tend to neglect when thinking about the writing process, yet they can have a big impact on the writing experience and the finished product. To understand how the writing environment can impact your process, imagine how it would feel to write a paper the night before the deadline while your roommate is throwing a party in the next room over. Maybe you want nothing more than to join the fun, or maybe you wish they would turn the music down so you could focus on the sentence you’ve now read back to yourself ten times over. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a recipe for effective writing, does it? Depending on where you write, you may encounter distractions that interrupt your thought processes and make writing more difficult. When looking over your draft the next day, you may even discover that what you’ve written makes less sense than you thought it did. This is because having your attention torn from the page can make you forget what you meant to say or had already written.
We all have different tolerances for distractions in our environments. Some people need complete silence in order to write, while some find a space that’s too quiet disconcerting. In addition to noise, you might find yourself distracted by movement, nearby electronics, or other people in the room. Maybe writing in the library works for you, but another student might feel too anxious to write anywhere except at home. Just as there’s no single writing process, there’s no one right place to write. Feel free to experiment with where you write until you find a place that allows you to focus and feel comfortable. In addition to considering where you write, you should also think about when you write. As you probably know, your energy levels can vary drastically throughout the day. Some people are night owls, while others struggle to stay awake once the sun sets. Your writing might also be affected by how long you spend in a writing session and what else in your life is competing for your time. If you’re rushing to finish an assignment before picking your siblings up from school, you might not be happy with the results. Likewise, if you try to complete a long paper in one sitting, you might tire yourself out and start making mistakes when you begin revising or editing. Of course, you won’t always have control over when you write. Deadlines are always looming. However, when you can, try to manage your energy by thinking carefully about when you write. You’ll likely have more success after getting a full eight hours of sleep or having a meal than you will trying to write while tired and hungry. And when you start to feel frustrated or stuck, think about taking a break. Ideas have a funny way of coming to us as soon as we start doing something else. Writing process researchers even have a word for this: incubation. Some people like to think they can write well anywhere, anytime. Depending on what you’re writing, this might be true. You can probably send a coherent text message whether you’re sitting at your desk or on the bus. When you’re writing something that requires sustained focus and a lot of brain power, however, thinking about when and where you write can make the writing process more productive and less painful.
Listen to the following podcasts on the writing process:
- How I Write by Thomas Girshin
"How I Write" is "A podcast from the California State University, San Bernardino Writing Intensive Program" that "features conversations with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members about writing and teaching writing."
Works Cited on This Page
- Edwards, Dustin, and Enrique Paz. “Only Geniuses can be Writers.” Bad Ideas About Writing, edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe, West Virginia University Libraries, 2017, pp. 64-70.
- Graham, Steve, and Gert Rijlaarsdam. “Writing Education Around the Globe: Introduction and Call for a New Global Analysis.” Reading and Writing, vol. 29, 2016, pp. 781-792.
- Murray, Donald M. “Teach the Motivating Force of Revision.” The English Journal, vol. 67, no. 7, 1978, pp. 56-60.