The Writing Process – Importance and Steps

Writing Process

• The writing process is the sequence of mental and physical activities involved in creating a text.
• Writing is not just the final draft. It is a complex process that involves skill building, brainstorming, resource collection, and practices for revising, generating, and editing the text.
• It is the steps one should follow to compose a text.

Importance of the Writing Process

• It will help you write better and faster.
• Focusing on individual steps will help the writer importance to all the points equally.
• Practice makes the copies perfect.
• It will help the writer produce an error-free final text.

The Six-Step Writing Process

• Pre-writing
• Drafting
• Revising
• Editing
• Proofreading
• Publishing

Prewriting

• This is the phase that comes before the writing process begins.
• This step includes brainstorming, resource collection, and research.
• Rely on genuine sources and identify the target audience.

Types of Pre-writing Strategies

• Free writing: Process of writing down everything that comes into your mind without regard to quality or rules.
• Clustering: Process of visually depicting your topic with the help of diagrams and flow charts.
• Outline: Write down the important points about the topic. We can then map them together to create a text.

Drafting

• After the pre-writing session, we proceed to create the first draft.
• It is a rough text that is edited later.
• When writing the first draft remember to focus on the ideas and not worry about grammar and vocabulary.

Revising

• It is the part where the text is modified.
• The text is rearranged, and the vocabulary is improved.
• Rewrite or delete sentences while revising.
• This is the first time the writer will be reading his text completely and might notice some irregularities in the central argument.
• A writer might require more research to develop the central argument.
• Ask for the help of a friend or peer during the revising process.

Editing

• Editing is the process where the writer corrects grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, style of writing, reputation, punctuation errors, etc.
• Editing should come after revising as no one wants to edit a text with lines that could be replaced or deleted.
• Ask someone else to help you during this stage.

Proofreading

• Proofreading is the one last look to catch any mistakes or errors in the text.
• Unless something is wrong, the writer does not have to make any changes to the document. Proofreading is just double-checking to make sure that the text does not contain any errors.

Publishing

It is the process of sharing the final draft with the public.