You will gain a foundation for college-level writing valuable for nearly any field. Students will learn how to read carefully, write effective arguments, understand the writing process, engage with others' ideas, cite accurately, and craft powerful prose. Course Learning Objectives • Summarize, analyze, question, and evaluate written and visual texts • Argue and support a position • Recognize audience and disciplinary expectations • Identify and use the stages of the writing process • Identify characteristics of effective prose • Apply proper citation practices • Discuss applying your writing knowledge to other writing occasions
Understanding Your Writing Process
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From the course by Duke University
English Composition I
341 ratings
From the lesson
The Writing Process
To start our course, we will examine your own writing process and what it means to respond to the writing of others. We will also think about what academic writing means.
Meet the Instructors
Dr. Denise ComerAssistant Professor of the Practice; Director of First-Year Writing
Thompson Writing Program
Hi, this segment is about understanding your writing process, and before we even
get started I want to say that I'm not going to prescribe a particular process
for you. What's important about the writing process
is that you reflect on what works for you, what doesn't work for you, what you'd like
to do differently. What you do differently across different
occasions for writing. I would also like to have this unit enable
you to talk to each other about your writing processes so perhaps you can
borrow an idea from somebody else and experiment with it and that will help you
with your writing process. So, again, I'm not trying to prescribe a
particular writing process. These processes vary drastically across
writers, across writing projects, and across different disciplines.
The writing process in general, has four stages.
These are recursive and overlapping stages.
So it's not linear and you don't move necessarily from one through the other.
But in general, writers usually approach a writing project by thinking about a
pre-drafting stage. Where you are deciding what it is you're
going to write and thinking about your writing project, then you move into
drafting. Which is where you're actively writing?
Then you might move into revision, which is where you're rethinking what you have
to write. And finally, at a certain point, perhaps
when you're up against a deadline. Or you're just tired of your project, you
hit the editing and proofreading stage, which is smaller polishing.
Here's an example of the writing process and how recursive and overlapping it is.
If you're like me, for instance, you might start with thinking about a particular
project and then move to, at some point, actually writing about it but then move
back to thinking about it and then move to revision.
And then maybe, I often move back to thinking about it again.
And at some point after I've done enough of these cycles, back and forth and back
and forth and been pretty non-linear about it.
I will finally reach a stage where I need to be editing and proofreading.
And that's most of the time near when a stage is moving towards its final product.
So, with the pre-drafting again as I said, it's about thinking, reading, researching,
planning. There are many different strategies you
can use for pre-drafting, one you already tried because it was the timeline that we
did for the introducing yourself as a writer to your classmates and me.
Other versions of prewriting include thinking, analyzing, questioning, reading,
brainstorming, outlining, talking, journaling, note taking anything you think
of that can help you decide what to say for a writing project would be
pre-drafting. Drafting is when you're actually writing.
And this again too, I don't approach this in a linear fashion where I start on page
one and move all the way through a writing project, and have a full complete draft.
You might do that, and that's great. And maybe that's a really effective way to
approach the process. I rarely approach a piece of writing like
that. But drafting is where you're actually
actively writing. Revision for me is the hardest and most
complicated aspect of writing. It's where you're doing substantive
rethinking about what it is that you're seeing and how you're seeing it involves
thinking about such aspects as reorganizing, adding material, deleting
material, rethinking what you have to say. And then finally, there's the editing and
proofreading, which is distinguished from revision because it's editing and
proofreading is about the smaller kind of local changes.
I find editing actually pretty easy. I'm not necessarily good at it because I
miss a lot of small proofreading changes. I bet you've probably already found a
couple of errors on the course assignments even though I've read them so carefully
and other people have too. But anyways I do like editing and
proofreading though because Editing and Proofreading involves looking at grammar,
clarity, spelling, punctuation, sentence level issues, word choice, it's about
polishing a piece of writing and I find that to be fun.
Revision I find hard and sometimes difficult, because I'm not sure if I'm
actually saying what I want to say or saying it how I want to say it.
So I tend to spend a long time with revision and less time with editing, maybe
I should spend more time with editing. Again, here are the stages of the writing
process and I also wanted to point out at this time what the writing process doesn't
include which to me is a little more interesting then the four stages that I
just spent time taking you through. What the writing process doesn't include
are how writers feel throughout the process.
So for me, generally when I'm in the pre-writing, pre-drafting stage, I'm
pretty happy. I love to think about writing projects,
more over ideas, spend time reflecting on what I want to say.
That's really fun, I love to read what other people have written and do research,
that's fun for me. The drafting stage and even this revision
stage, if I can collapse those for a minute.
At this point, generally I tend to, probably feel a little unhappy or scared.
[laugh] Somewhere, probably at this arrow, is where I'm most worried about a
particular writing project, because I feel like I haven't thought through it enough,
or I'm not ready to start writing, or I don't really like my ideas enough, or I
don't know what I'm going to, to say, or I get caught up in what readers are going to
think about what I've said, that they're not going to hear me or they're not going
to like what I said or they're going to reject what I had to say.
And then with the revision sometimes I'm not totally happy because I feel like I
spend too long on the revision stage. And I get a little tired of what I'm
writing and it's never quite reaching what I want it to say.
But again here with editing and I usually get happy here.
Another thing that the writing process, as I outlined it, doesn't get at are various
rituals or quirks that writers have around writing.
You might have a particular pen that you like to use.
Or a particular place you like to go. Or you might have to have two cups of
coffee of a particular kind, or tea. Before you start writing, or you might
have to go for a walk for ten minutes before you start writing.
All of those things are really interesting to me anyways, the rituals and quirks that
circulate around the writing process. And finally, the third aspect that this
overview doesn't get at that I'm interested in thinking about are also
disciplinary distinctions and how writing processes just vary.
I'll just put a wiggly line to show that writing processes vary dramatically across
writing projects. I might use one process for writing an
email to a friend that's very different then a process I would use for creating a
25 page article for potential publication in a journal.
The writing process you use for writing for this class might look pretty different
than writing that you're doing for other classes, or for your job, or in your
personal life. And the writing process that I do for
scholarship in my discipline of writing studies and English literature.
Might look really different from my colleague in ecology does for articles in
her discipline or what my colleague in anthropology does for articles in his
discipline. So I'd really like us to begin thinking
about not just in general the writing process but specifically about these three
things, oops, lets include that too. Okay, that how writers feel Throughout the
process what your particular quirks are. Maybe there's another stage that hyou want
to include that you think needs to be there that's not there.
And then also how it varies across writing projects and across disciplines.
So I invite you to please visit the discussion forum and have these
converstaions. Share with each other these more
interesting unique aspects of the writing process.
And also please watch the videos of our disciplinary consultants, who will talk
about the writing processes in variant different disciplines.
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