A Guide to English: The Writing Process

Below are some guidebooks aimed at students which give in depth advice on how to go through the multiple steps of the writing process. When we give ourselves time and treat writing as a multi-step process, rather than a task we have to get right in one go (the weekend before the paper is due, right?), we can allow our thoughts and research to more fully develop in the prewriting stage, we feel less inhibited in our initial drafting of the paper, and we recognize that revision has the power to reshape and refine our writing into a rhetorically superior text. Once the content is ready we engage in proofreading to ensure the text is free of errors and ready to appear before the world at the final stage of publishing.

Check out the boxes below for more discussion of each stage the writing process.

Before doing anything else, look carefully at the instructions or requirements for the assignment you have to complete. Remember: You can produce an amazing piece of writing and still lose points if you do not follow the instructions or are missing required elements.

A rubric is a table that tells you what point values your professor is likely to assign if you perform at a particular level for each criterion. A criterion is an aspect of your paper your professor is indicating you are going to be graded on, with a description typically offered for what a perfect or high score would look like in terms of what your paper achieves.

If you bear in mind the assignment requirements and/or the rubric criteria through each stage of the writing process, you will make it more likely that your final paper will meet all the requirements and achieve a higher score.

Fulfilling your professor's expectations is not always so easy as checking a box, however. In college writing we are expected to engage with the genre norms of the scholarly discipline that we are taking a class in. The norms of writing an English paper will differ from the norms of writing a Political Science paper, and will be still more different from the norms of writing a paper for a Biology class.

That is why in order to position ourselves for the most success for the writing task in front of us, it is important to consider the rhetorical situation. The rhetorical situation consists of three main factors:

1. The message you want to deliver
2. The audience you want to deliver the message to
3. Your credibility as a person delivering that message

There is also a fourth factor which shapes the other three, that being the overall context of the situation. At the prewriting stage, you won't necessarily have each of these factors sorted out: that's the whole point of prewriting. Pre-writing is a process of discovery, but while you are exploring it helps to have a general sense of what it is you are looking for (or else you might miss it!)

While pre-writing, think about:

1. What is the topic I want to deliver a message about? Is my topic too broad or too narrow (which is in great part determined by ...)
2. Who is my audience? Have they heard this message before? Will it catch their attention? Will my topic strike them as too broad, or will it seem too obscure/narrow? Does my message engage with/address their prior knowledge and understanding about the topic? Does it approach the topic from a "fresh" perspective that the audience could get excited about?
3. How can I establish my own credibility to write about this topic? What can I do to demonstrate that I should be listened to when writing about this topic? (For example, how does the narrowness or broadness of my topic affect my credibility? How can I engage with and respond to other sources of information who do already have credibility with my audience?)

In the prewriting stage, we are trying to unearth both our own preexisting knowledge as well as knowledge we develop through our research. There are various techniques for getting our own knowledge out of our heads and into a form where we can readily go back to it, ranging from pure brainstorming by free-writing thoughts related to the topic, creating a concept or mind map which connects related concepts and allows you to consider what the relations are between the concepts, or using a graphic organizer like a KWHL chart, where you write what you Know (K), Want to Know (W), How You Will Find Out (H), and afterwards, What You Learned (L).

• Bubble.us - (semi)free mindmapping tool
• A Blank KWHL Chart - useful as a graphic organizer and for setting research objectives

Bear in mind however, that prewriting is a recursive process, meaning it is repetitive: unearthing your existing knowledge about concepts related to a topic will lead you to other sources in order to learn more about those concepts, which can in turn lead you to add more concepts to explore and understand in order to gain a fuller understanding of the topic. When prewriting, paradoxically, we expand before we contract: that is, first we want to expand our understanding, so that we can have sufficient context for the next stage of prewriting, where we narrow our topic in preparation for more focused research and writing.

Because academic writing is a conversation, we try to both respond to what other scholars have said and contribute our own original ideas in return. One great strategy to ensure you are well-positioned to both respond and be original is to narrow your topic. When a topic is too large or too general, it becomes much harder to deal with all aspects of it in any reasonable depth. (Think about it: if a topic is broad enough that other people have written 200+ page books about it, it is probably too broad for your paper.)

One way to narrow a topic is to add qualifiers. Instead of covering all of [my topic], how about [my topic] + [a particular time period] OR [a particular situation] OR [a particular group of people]?

Each qualifier narrows the topic even further, and each time you narrow the topic, in all likelihood you also narrow the number of other scholars who have commented on specifically that topic + your chosen qualifiers at the length and depth that you can bring to it. (Fewer preexisting points of view means there is more space for *your point of view.*)

Consult the Academic Research tab of this guide to learn about using databases to search for articles, using the Gustavus Library catalog to search for books, and about how to use bibliographic trace techniques to understand the web of scholarly discussion and the keystone texts related to your topic.

As you gather sources and consult them, use critical reading techniques to preserve your thoughts and responses as these will help you come up with the thesis statement you will attempt to prove (and supporting arguments with which to prove it) when you next go to outline your paper.

Below you will find a sample outline for a paper taken from the class NDL 112 : Themes in Science Fiction Literature, showing one possible way to organize arguments within a paper. The instructions required students to use at least two primary texts (the short stories and novels that the class read) to prove an argument about how the treatment of a theme in science fiction literature differed across time periods, and why that matters. The outline strategically assigns specific paragraphs for each required element, making it more likely that the first draft at least addresses all required elements on the rubric.

The organization you choose for a given essay might be informed by a variety of factors, including chronology, the need to address a preliminary idea before applying it to a subsidiary idea, or aiming for an elliptical effect by first addressing and then returning to an idea once the elucidation of other ideas can shed a different light.

Regardless of what organization you choose, it is vital to have a clear thesis statement that asserts an original idea that you wish to prove. Without a clear, assertive, and original thesis, the remainder of the paper is undermined because readers cannot understand what it is you are marshaling all this additional information/verbiage to prove. Get the thesis right, however, and you have the makings of a strong essay.

Preview the supporting arguments you will make in your body paragraphs right after your thesis.

A good technique for writing a body paragraph is to begin each paragraph with an assertion (or topic sentence) that in some way supports your thesis (which you will have previewed in the introduction), then use the remainder of the paragraph to explain and support that assertion, or engage in conversation with others who offer information that relates to or helps you back that assertion up. It is often an effective technique to close a supporting paragraph with a sentence that reconnects to or recontextualizes the supporting argument (which you have just proven) within the main thesis of the paper; alternately, the concluding sentence of a supporting paragraph could be used to transition to the next paragraph, which builds off the supporting arguments that you have just proved.

During the Drafting stage, you use your outline and the ideas you developed during Prewriting and focus on getting the ideas on paper. A draft is not meant to be perfect, nor should you spend much energy at this stage on your grammar or style. Instead think of your first draft as though you are producing clay (or play-doh, if you prefer) which you will substantially reshape during the Revision stage, and then make perfectly presentable (in terms of grammar and style) only when you reach the Proofreading stage. In drafting, by contrast, we are doing something more elemental: we are fulsomely developing our ideas into a text, because only once we have that draft of text in front of us can we do more precise actions to it.

The Revision stage is the stage where our writing goes from the first words and sentences that came out of our heads when working from our outline to the best words and sentences that we can come up with to express what we were trying to say. Experienced writers understand that revision is the stage where the author has the most agency to take an okay-sounding text and turn it into a rhetorical tour de force.

Authors accomplish this by analyzing the text they produced at multiple levels, typically starting from the largest (the paragraph-level) and moving to smaller levels (the sentences, the phrase, individual words) as they go, asking themselves questions like, "Is this the best way to structure this (paragraph, sentence, phrase)? Is there a way that would be more persuasive to my audience?" By proceeding from largest to smallest, they ensure that at all levels of its structure, the text is as good as it can be.

Here are two books that provide additional guidance about the revision process:

During the Proofreading stage, we let go of our concerns over content and focus strictly on ensuring our grammar and word usage is correct. This is the most narrow and nitpicky stage of the writing process, which is why it makes sense to leave it until after we have dealt with larger questions of form and content during the previous stages of our writing.

Useful resources for Proofreading include the relevant style guide for your course (e.g. the MLA Handbook, the APA Handbook, etc.) and their citation guidelines to ensure you are properly formatting your text and citations. (See the Formatting and Citations page of this section.)

In order to ensure your individual words are accurately expressing what you mean to say, it is helpful to consult usage guides like the ones found in the Modern Grammar & Usage box on the English Language section of this guide.

Here are couple more books with useful information about the proofreading process:

You may not realize it yet, but there are numerous venues and formats available for publishing your writing. Publishing allows other people to read your work and enables you to get recognized. There are different processes for getting published in a popular or a scholarly venue, and there are also more modalities for publishing your work than just as a research paper.

For publishing in a popular venue, consult the Getting Published box on the Creative Writing page of this guide.

For a list of just some of the literary journals you could submit to, consult the Literary Reviews available in print and online box on the Searching for Articles page, go to the website of a journal that seems appropriate for your topic and study their Submission Requirements.

Here are some books that present more information about publishing in a scholarly journal, as well as other possible publishing formats: