Writing Process Essay: Pro Tips for Correct Completion
Every student has to come to grips with the academic writing process sooner or later. It’s an activity you must perform daily, whether in classes or during homework completion. Thus, coming to grips with the essentials of the writing process is essential for educational progression and a high GPA.
If you’re unsure about the ins and outs of academic composition, use our guide written by experienced professionals. We’ve crafted this guide to help you develop and customize your proven algorithm for homework completion. So, you’re sure to find some workable tips and hacks to speed up your writing progress and remove confusion from this activity.
What Should Be the First Step in the Writing Process?
Every writing task should start with the planning phase, whether a literary analysis essay or an extensive research assignment. You won’t write anything during this phase, focusing on research and topic formulation instead. Here are some details of getting this phase right and completing it without friction or hassle.
#1 Topic Selection
This step is the greatest challenge for students, especially if you don’t have a clear prompt from your professor. Sometimes tutors assign a concrete topic or give a list to choose from; in this case, you have nothing to worry about; your freedom of selection is limited. In other cases, professors leave the topic choice to students by only delineating the area or broad subject of research interest.
In this situation, you should revisit your class readings and topics covered in the module. This set of educational materials can shed light on what is expected from you on a specific assignment. So, take notes of the research gaps, interesting subjects, and future research directions delineated in your class materials; use these suggestions to formulate a unique, original research idea.
#2 Research
Once you’ve come up with a narrow, focused research topic and purpose, it’s time to find out what published material is available about it. Conduct a basic search on Google and visit a couple of scholarly databases to see what publications discuss the issue of your interest. It’s vital to find enough research evidence supporting your point before proceeding to the next steps; otherwise, you won’t have enough evidence to support your ideas.
Essay about Writing Process
How can you compose something interesting and attention-worthy about the mechanics of writing? If you need to write a paper about the writing process, it may be challenging to choose a topic right away. To help you out, we’ve come up with a set of interesting, fresh topics that may fuel your audience’s attention and fetch you a high grade from the professor.
- The importance of applying feedback in the writing process.
- Writing with power: secrets to persuasive composition.
- The golden rules of literary analysis writing.
- Role of structure in academic composition.
- The stage of discovery and why you shouldn’t skip it.
- Process and product in academic writing.
- Problem-solving techniques in the educational composition process.
- The fundamentals of the writing process theory.
- Research and composition in L2: implications for international students.
- Peer review as an effective strategy for writing skill improvement.
Use these topics to explore various facets of the writing process, and you’re sure to deliver interesting, readable pieces.
Stages of the Writing Process
First, let’s cover the stages of the writing process in their generic form. In other words, we focus on the nature of writing activities broadly, without specifying the particular steps you’ll need to take. The basic skills you should have for effective writing are:
- Research
You can’t start writing your paper out of the blue, even if you have some basic idea and knowledge about its content. The major principle of any academic task is a firm scholarly basis, which ensures that you voice something more than your personal opinion or guess. Thus, you should hand-pick the sources that will back up your points before beginning the writing process; they will help you develop the parts of the outline.
Therefore, preliminary research is a vital starting stage of any writing process. We recommend consulting several databases at once to find sources of different types. For instance, you might need a book, an authoritative website, and a peer-reviewed journal publication to support your opinion on the chosen subject. Such a mix of academic sources will look much better than a couple of websites or blog posts.
- Outlining
A good essay outline is half of your writing success. It serves as a guideline for each part’s composition, helping you to stay on topic and avoid wandering around the subject without a focus. Once you complete the first stage of the writing process – research – you already have a couple of informative sources highlighting your subject from different perspectives. You can base your outline on these sources and single out various interesting facts from what the researchers have discovered before you.
Your outline’s key components are a clear thesis statement and two to five supporting ideas. These ideas should all relate to your thesis statement and back it from different angles. This way, each key idea will serve as the basis for one paragraph, and each paragraph will add to the persuasive effect of your text.
- Drafting
Once the outline is ready, it’s time to start the actual writing stage. Now you’ll need to compose the entire text with proper regard to the structure, task type, and word count assigned by the professor. Find all these details in the task’s prompt to avoid grade reduction. Produce some simple calculations: your introduction and conclusion should take 10% of the word count each, and the rest goes to the body of your text.
Our experts advise starting with the body of your text; it’s much simpler to write the essay or research paper paragraph by paragraph, combine them with effective transitions, and then compose an introduction based on what you have. The thesis statement is also a guiding line of your essay, but its final composition will come easier after the body is ready. You’ll have all your arguments at your fingertips, knowing exactly what the thesis should include.
- Editing
The final stage – that of editing – is no less important than other writing stages. It reviews your product from multiple sides to uncover any imperfections, typos, or flow errors before submission. Please ensure that you reserve enough for editing, as you should look at the text with a fresh eye. Thus, it’s better to study the written paper for a couple of hours or on the next day after its writing.
5 Steps of the Writing Process
Based on the activities we’ve just discussed, you should single out the following five steps of the writing algorithm.
- Prewriting.
This stage presupposes studying your professor’s draft and identifying the topic or the range of topics on which you should compose the assignment. Once you clarify the subject, do some research to see from which angle other researchers approached it to find a unique perspective for your writing piece.
- Planning.
You’re expected to develop a full roadmap of the research paper or essay that you’ll complete at the next stages of the writing process. In other words, you are to create a cohesive and informative outline that will guide you throughout the entire writing process. - Drafting.
Next, you should compose a draft of the assigned paper. It shouldn’t look perfect in terms of structure and flow. You may not yet have all transitions or properly formatted supporting evidence at this stage. Just write the draft paragraphs for every supporting fact you’re planning to use and order them in your paper, finalizing the process with an introduction and a conclusion. - Finalization of the draft.
Now you should work on the draft to polish it and turn it into a final paper. This stage includes crafting good topic sentences and transitions and checking that every piece of the paragraph is in its place. Ensure that every paragraph has an introductory statement (topic sentence), facts from external sources to back it up, and their proper interpretation. Write the transitions to ensure that your readers pass from one section to another without confusion. Align all parts into a cohesive, well-flowing piece.
- Revision.
Having a finalized draft is not the end of the writing process, no matter how strongly you want to end it. Now comes the editing and revision time, during which you need to analyze your paper’s syntax, grammar, and spelling, as well as revisit its overall cohesion and coherence.
Elements of the Writing Process
Besides taking care of the correct algorithm of pre-writing, writing, and editing steps, you should ensure the consistency of your composition with the key qualities distinguishing mediocre papers from stellar ones.
- Focus
Your text should be dedicated to one central idea.
- Development
Every paragraph should offer additional perspectives for its exploration.
- Unity
Every body paragraph should relate to the main idea stated in the introduction.
- Coherence
Every new paragraph should logically flow from the previous one, offering readers a logical flow of ideas and arguments.
- Correctness
The paper should follow the standards of proper academic composition.
FAQ
Why is the writing process important?
Keeping to a well-structured writing process is important for every student, as it provides an exact algorithm for effective writing task completion. You won’t procrastinate or go off topic if you use a concrete process; your home tasks thus become more manageable.
What are the steps of the writing process?
The academically approved writing process should start with pre-writing activities, continue with an outlining exercise, and proceed to the actual writing step. The resulting draft should be revised several times to achieve excellence in composition.
What should be the first step in the writing process?
The home task completion process always starts with preparation. You don’t need to compose anything at this phase; your task is to get ready with preliminary research and topic formulation. We recommend studying relevant sources and making notes first.
What are the five steps of the writing process?
The five stages of the writing procedure include pre-writing (which involves research and topic creation), planning the essay’s structure, writing the rough draft, finalizing that draft, and editing the entire paper for grammar, syntax, and logical flow improvements.
Which is the last step in the writing process?
The final stage of any writing endeavor is the editing and proofreading activity. Please don’t skip it, as it’s a primary determinant of your writing piece’s quality. During the editing phase, you should check whether your content flows logically and whether you have any typos or inconsistencies.
