"Organize, organize, organize." –U.S. Vice President Al Gore

 

Again there exist different versions of the writing process with more or fewer steps, but the one I have found best for both my students and myself comprises five:

1. Generate ideas
2. Organize/plan
3. Draft
4. Revise
5. Edit
6. (Repeat steps 4 and 5.)

Note that this is not dissimilar to the informal process you probably go through anyway, but you probably approach them much differently than I will instruct here.

So here we have a nice linear process, right?  Well, almost.

As teacher and author Jill Singleton puts it, “Life is messy. It doesn’t happen step by step. The process of writing is the same way. Good writers move forward and backward between the steps.”[1] For example, when writing your draft, you may think of a better way to organize your ideas or even a new idea. The same goes with revision: you may think of a better way to organize your paper. As Singleton notes, “That’s good! That is how experienced writers really write.”

So which are the “discovery” steps? You may be tempted to say only the first step, but almost paradoxically, even though we move towards a more reader-oriented stance as we go through the steps, all of them are at least somewhat writer-oriented. In step 2, especially, you’re seeing how your ideas do and don’t fit together, whether they make a coherent argument, where your own logic or evidence is faulty or insufficient (or convincing). And step 4, revision, is an important learning phase as well in which you clarify your argument and add new evidence, as in steps 1 and 2.

Proceed to Step 1

 

[1] Singleton, Jill, Writers at Work: The Paragraph, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011. p. 4.