The Process of Writing: What You Should Know Before Picking up That Pen

The Process of Writing: What You Should Know before Picking up That Pen

Sally caught the ball. The long-haired, athletic Sally gathered up all her strength and stretched, like Stretch Arm Strong, to grab that ball right out of the sky above. Which one sounds better? Which one would you rather have in your paragraph? With some simple things to keep in mind, you too can write like that. The book entitled, The Process of Writing: Composing through Critical Thinking, by Roberta Allen and Marcia Mascolini, taught you everything from thinking before you write to putting things together, all the way to how to prepare specific forms of essays. It’s definitely something you should read before even thinking about another paper.

First of all, before you can write and actual paper, you must first go through certain steps in order to prepare the essay, and then when the time comes you can write your essay with ease and add detail. When you have a clear head you can write so much easier, although it is hard to obtain that mind set. Getting your thought down on paper without worrying about the perfection and detail helps the whole writing process and analysis. The first thing to do before even starting to brainstorm is to figure out whom your audience is, who are you aiming the paper to? You need to make your message meaningful to your audience, and make sure you think about what the audience needs, expectations, knowledge, and attitudes towards your subject are. Anticipate their questions and how they will respond to your answers. Some key ideas to think about when assessing your audience are to think of the primary and secondary readers are. Then what do they already know about your subject, and what characteristics about your audience will affect how the paper will look? Then think about what is going to be most important to your audience and what format they will prefer. After figuring out who your audience is you need to think about your purpose and the form of the paper before actually writing it. Written messages that someone else asks you to write are called reader-initiated messages, and messages that you decide to write by yourself are called writer-initiated messages. Make sure you are on the right track at the very beginning, and this process will flow much easier. After you have made sure all of these elements are in order, you are ready to begin to put things on paper.

There are three techniques for generating ideas: brainstorming, mapping, and free writing. When brainstorming, there are a few things to try so you get the best results. Try focusing on your topic for about 10-15 minutes without interruptions, and jot down every idea that flows through your mind, and don’t stop to correct things, it’s supposed to be sloppy. Try not to criticize yourself and just get out as many ideas as you can, even if they are not connected to your topic, just whatever is going through your mind. After that you can go back and evaluate your thoughts, cross out things that have nothing to do with your topic and things like that. The second technique is mapping, to do this just draw circles and lines connecting ideas to each other. The idea of this is to get your mind to make connections with things so that you can make paragraphs and you have support. The last one is free writing, and it’s kind of like brainstorming. Give yourself a goal of a certain amount of minutes, say ten, and then just write of everything you can that has to do with your topic. If you don’t know what to say, write exactly that. After choosing one, or all, of these techniques you are ready to start outlining your thoughts. These are all steps of prewriting, which are vital to the overall outcome. When outlining, first, remove all items that have nothing to do with your topic and then group the remaining items into subtopics. Make a sort of list of some kind and just organize your ideas, so you can begin to see what the parts of your paper are going to form to. One thing to keep in mind while outlining, is that your ideas are in parallel structure, meaning they are in vertical order. Doing this allows you to organize all of your ideas to write your best. Now you are ready to begin actually writing your paper.

When composing paragraphs, according to The Process of Writing, there are three basic rules for writing effectively: to compose a precise topic sentence, to show how the supporting sentences relate to the topic, and to arrange the supporting sentences in a logical way. The very first thing on that agenda is to have a good solid topic sentence, and have it be a clear statement of your purpose of the paper. After reading the first sentence the reader should know the purpose of the paper. After you are content on a topic sentence you can start to support your reasoning with subtopics and detail.