I sometimes compare the writing process to learning how to type.  If you aren’t a skilled typist, chances are you use the hunt-and-peck method, picking out the letters and jabbing them with your index fingers. When I see people typing like this, I ask why they don’t use the much more efficient method of typing with all ten digits.  They usually answer that they just never took the time to learn.  Of course, the time spent learning and mastering typing more than pays for itself in the long run, if you type a lot.

The same is true for writing.  As you practice the following steps, your writing and your confidence will improve and you’ll find that the process naturally becomes more streamlined.  You’ll be spending less time correcting mistakes, because you’re not making as many.  Your planning becomes more efficient because you remember what worked and didn’t in the past.  What was once a struggle will become second nature, an automatic part of any essay you write. 

• Assessing the writing task
• Picking a topic
• Brainstorming or listing ideas
• Clustering ideas to highlight their relationship to one another.
• Asking questions to generate further ideas or remind you of what you don’t know about your topic. 
• Freewriting or stream of consciousness to get all your ideas, idea fragments, or potential ideas on paper
• Journal writing to explore your own feelings about your topic.

• Crafting a tentative thesis
• Settling on a method of organization
• Creating an outline
• Determining which strategies of writing to use (narrative, example, cause and effect, etc.)

• Re-organizing to maximize effectiveness (also called “global revision” )
• Editing to fix superficial errors with grammar and style.
• Proofreading the final draft (very important!)

Not every writer will use every method listed in every step.  However, I advise you to pick one or more strategies from each of the three stages.  Very often students skip the first and third steps, concentrating on just the second, drafting.  They think it saves time, and gets the job done more quickly.  This may indeed be the case, but what you save in time you quickly lose in precision, organization, effectiveness and (in the end) your final grade.  If your goal for this class is to really improve your writing, it will be vital to spend time in all three phases.