The Writing Process - continued

This diagram visually explains the writing process. Following this will give you a great deal of help as you work on your projects throughout this course.
As you review the writing process, keep the following points in mind.

Audience:
  • Who are you going to address in your writing? Are you addressing your teacher, your peers, a scholarship committee, or perhaps even an essay contest panel of judges?

Generating Ideas:
  • What are some ideas that you could address in your writing? Construct your possible controlling idea. Remember that the controlling idea should be an answer to the question. This will often be a re-phrasing of the question that has been asked, followed by a "because" type of clause. Once you have a potential controlling idea in mind, you can begin to map out what your main points in the discussion will be. These points are the points in the argument that will win the argument for you.

Limiting Ideas:
  • As you generate ideas, you may discover that you have a topic that is too broad. You may then decide that you really need to bite off a smaller chunk if you want to retain any sanity whatsoever. You have not made any plans at this point that are set in concrete, so you are free to change your ideas or your approach to the topic.

Organizing Your Ideas:
  • Once you have some ideas generated, you may wish to give some thought as to the order in which you wish to provide your points. Strategy is important and you may wish to consider the approach you take in order to make your winning argument. Do you start off with the biggest point or do you build up to the "coup de grace" of your argument? Again, this is the starting point. You can play around with order so that you can present a logical set of points for your audience.

First Draft Writing:
  • Once you have your audience firmly in mind, and you have developed a tentative controlling idea for you to develop as well as some main points that you will want to address in your text, you are ready to put it down to paper.
  • In first draft writing, don't worry about getting everything right! It is more important to get the ideas out of your head and onto your paper. Don't worry about grammar, spelling, sentence structure, or even whether it makes sense to you. It will all be taken care of later on in the editing and revising process. Right now, the main point is to get your ideas into some sort of comprehensible form.
Revising and Editing:
  • Ugh, you might be saying as you look at your work! This is totally disjointed and a mess. Okay, now that you have put your first draft together, you can go back to begin the refining process. Does your controlling idea make sense and does what you say after that relate to the controlling idea? Remember, the controlling idea is just that - it controls whatever you are saying in your text. You can begin to correct some of the obvious errors, but you are just getting ready for some feedback. Does the order in your presentation make sense and would this make sense to the audience that you have created the text for?
  • It is expected that you will go through the entire writing process for each and every assignment in this course. Unless otherwise stated, the assignments you complete are to be submitted as final, polished drafts. If you have many errors in grammar, spelling, organization, and so on, don't be surprised if your teacher asks you to make these corrections and resubmit.