The Writing Process Video Lecture

This lesson is about the writing process. Using the writing process when you write essays will help you to do a better job. The first step in the writing process is prewriting. Prewriting is what you do before you write. Some examples of prewriting are clustering, in which you just jot your ideas down on a piece of paper. You can circle the different thoughts that you have and connect them to other thoughts. When you do this, you should not think very much about it. You should do it quickly, just to get your ideas out on paper. Another prewriting activity is outlining. After you do a cluster, you can start to organize your ideas into an outline. The benefit of using an outline is that you can see, before you start writing, if you have enough supporting ideas, and enough details, and enough examples to develop your essay. It also helps you to organize your ideas so that they flow logically. The next step is writing. After you do the prewriting and you get some ideas about what you’re going to write about, it’s time to just start writing. In the writing step, you start with a rough draft. A rough draft starts to look like an essay, but as you can see in these two examples, it’s very messy. Again, you don’t have to think too much about what you’re writing, you just wanna get your ideas down on the paper. So, write quickly and don’t stop to think about what you’re going to say next. It’s also okay to scratch out words or to change your mind about what you’re going to say. When you’re writing the rough draft, you don’t have to worry about mistakes, you’ll worry about that later. Just get as much written as you can in your rough draft. The third step of the writing process is rewriting. This means writing again. The first thing you do in the rewriting phase is to revise. When you revise, you read through your rough draft and you look for ideas that don’t work, or maybe need to be developed more. When you’re revising, you’re looking at the ideas in your paper, and you’re trying to make them better. You might add more examples, or you might word something differently so that it makes a stronger point. Here’s another example of revising. You see that they took their rough draft, and in the margins, they wrote other ideas that they had. These are things that they’ll want to add in later, when they do their next draft. You can also see that they took out some things that they thought didn’t work well. When you revise, you should expect to have lots of things written on your paper, like this. Going through this process and making changes is what’s going to make your writing better. And this revision process can go on for a while. You might write and then revise. You might write your paper again, and then when you read through it again, you find other things that you want to revise. And you keep doing this until your paper is just the way you want it. Finally, you will edit your paper. When you edit, this means looking for mistakes like spelling mistakes, or punctuation, or grammar mistakes. Don’t worry about these things early in the writing process. Wait until the end and then check your spelling and grammar mistakes. Then, it’s time to write your final draft. And when you do your final draft, this is where you need to pay attention to making things correct. You’ll want to follow your teacher’s instructions about how to format the paper. If your teacher requires that you type it, you’ll need to type the final draft. And your final draft should not have any corrections on it. If you find a mistake in the final draft, you need to type it again, and print it again. The final draft should be perfect. Good writers follow some kind of a process. If you don’t have your own process, try the process mentioned here. If you follow these steps, you are sure to improve your writing.