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Deadlines. Every writer lives and breathes deadlines. Students also must learn how to
meet deadlines. While understanding the rhetorical situation provides writers with a framework
to better focus the message, given the circumstances of audience, purpose and context, writers
also need to have a clear idea of what steps that they will need to take in order to meet
deadlines. Often, writers need to plan multiple papers with varying deadlines for a variety
of audiences. Therefore, building writing process knowledge, which essentially means
to learn how to successfully plan and revise, not only helps writers to organize their time
and schedule effectively, but also increases their ability to conduct self-reviews and
incorporate feedback. Inexperienced writers often underestimate the amount of time required
for successful completion of these steps. Others may know that writing takes a lot of
time, but may not have a firm understanding of what all is involved in completing these
steps. For example, some writers think that revision simply means editing or proof reading,
when in reality revision takes up the bulk of the writer’s time. Still others may not
make the connection that one of the most important stages of prewriting is reading. As you can
see from this timeline of the writing process, revision takes up the bulk of time. And an
important part of revision involves the time to put something down for a while, to focus
on the other things and then return to the work with a fresh perspective. Once writers
understand that stepping away helps them to better see their work from the reader’s
perspective, then this time away can be built into the time line effectively. Advanced writers
focus their efforts on other writing projects that may be at different stages in the process
and thus might require different activities with different time requirements. This enables
successful writers to productively move forward on a variety of projects without getting bogged
down in any one stage of writing. For example, editing can usually be accomplished in a few
hours, a couple of hours even if it’s a short project. Depending on the project length,
so can drafting. If a writer is reading, which is prewriting for one paper, editing another,
and working on revision on a third, each of the projects is advanced and the writer can
take time away from each project while maintaining motivation and enthusiasm for all three. There
is also the crucial feedback loop to consider when gaging time on this project. Who will
provide the feedback, and do you need to schedule an appointment? These questions need to be
answered early in the revision stage, and you need to plan to have the time to incorporate
the feedback. Cognitive scientists have proven that the most effective way to improve writing
is through practice and feedback loops. Planning enough time for these loops really helps improve
writing. So now that you can see how time is divided along the process continuum, I
am going to zoom into each step to provide a brief overview of professional writers’
process for building successful papers. Advanced writers understand what strategies work best
for them in each stage of writing. But they also vary their strategies, depending on the
purpose of the writing. I will explain some of the most popular strategies in each stage
but focus more on the revision in this presentation because after years of pulling students about
their process knowledge, I have learned that while most students have prewriting, drafting,
and editing strategies, fewer students understand the important step in writing: revision. Many
students understand that there are certain strategies that are effective when prewriting.
Often students will outline, use a concept map, or other visual device to help them organize
their ideas. But many students forget that re-reading the directions and re-examining
the prompt itself, often multiple times, and even annotating the prompt is an incredibly
important stage of prewriting. This helps writers determine the actual purpose and really
focuses their efforts on what they need to do, what is the job of this particular writing
assignment. Reading the direction is crucial for determining the purpose. And reading itself,
reading research material, reading the assigned articles or journals that are associated with
the assignment, reading the textbook of course, and actively reading with annotations really
helps to build the knowledge, the subject matter knowledge, that is required for sound
writing. So reading and researching along with annotating really help to prepare the
writer and build that reservoir of subject knowledge that the writer will be able to
tap into when they sit down to draft. After the reading finishes, and the planning starts,
and again, outlining and concept map are certainly a great strategy for planning, but many students
do not understand the relevance of actually talking and discussing with both peers, fellow
classmates, instructors, friends, family. The act of discussing writing projects can
be one of the most helpful ways to really start wrapping your head around what it is
your paper will be about. Another step that’s incredibly important for any research paper
is to create an annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is just a paragraph
attached to the source material, to the citation, that tells you where the material came from,
and really can help to summarize key points from a lot of research that the writer will
then plan on incorporating or at least learning from. It can also build background knowledge
that may not be directly incorporated into the paper, but it really helps the writer
to start processing information and what will be useful for writing the paper. So annotated
bibliographies are an excellent tool to really build both subject matter knowledge, but also
to help organize multiple sources and to keep track of all the sources by creating a citation,
so that when that time comes in the editing process to make sure your bibliography or
your work cited page is accurate that you have the notes that will provide you the information
that you need. Another skill in prewriting that I think is incredibly important is the
ability to write out topic sentences that will help give you direction for your paper.
And the T paragraph continues to be a foundational tool for writing because once you understand
the T paragraph, then you understand that you can create an outline based on the topic
sentence, because the topic sentence really makes the point of the paragraph clear. So
it’s a little bit more advanced of a writing process step than an outline, because it really
pushes writer into sentences and organizing those sentences prior to drafting. Prewriting
is an excellent way to really loosen up the writer’s ideas, and to really let your mind
go into what it is you are going to be writing about without a lot of constraints. I think
some writers are held back and procrastinate because they play so much demands on what
the expectation of each sentence should be that it becomes a painfully slow and tedious
process to begin drafting. Whereas if you free write by asking yourself “what do I
know about this topic? What do I find interesting about this topic?” Just answering those
questions on paper, and letting yourself go into the subject without any, you know, organization
in mind, without the introduction, body paragraphs, without anything really blocking your ability
to think and write. Prewriting can really help writers who tend to harness themselves
too much, and therefore end up procrastinating. Brainstorming is very similar to prewriting
but instead of focusing on complete writing projects, writers will use keywords and phrases
that help to get the creative ideas flowing and also the key concepts that they need to
cover started. So brainstorming is just a simplified version of prewriting, using sentences
and phrases rather than full paragraphs. Clustering is more of a visual mode to write down phrases
and keywords, but then to start circling the phrases and keywords so that you can group
them together and begin to organize your essay even before you’re writing, using circles
and lines to connect concepts and really get to what the points are in the different areas
that you are going to explore even before writing. Researching the audience also make
you think about that reader, what their expectations are, what the genre is, how you’re going
to best convey the message in regards to their particular needs as an audience. And it is
always a crucial part of prewriting because you need to address the audience appropriately.
Identifying the evidence in your reading by highlighting, by creating a double entry journal
where one side you list the evidence that you pull from the text and the other side
you explain how you are going to incorporate it. These are tactics that I use all the time
in prewriting. Before I start writing, I gather the evidence that I am going to use and really
synthesize why I’m using that evidence. And also just pulling quotations so you know
what evidence you are going to use helps you to formulate your ideas in relation to the
purpose of the project. And again, a double entry journal is just literally putting a
line down in the center of the page, one side is the quotation, the other side is the explanation.
And that really begins the writing process from an evidence base, which is crucial for
all research papers, or any text based assignment. Again, re-reading the direction, re-reading
key aspects of the assigned reading, or re-reading the research so that you really understand
it, is crucial to build subject matter knowledge, and to really build your confidence, and to
help you formulate your points in your mind before writing.