1.3. The stages of the writing process

Whatever your writing habits, they are simply the enabling conditions that allow you to begin and pursue your writing process. These habits are the physical and psychological scenery for the central action — the intellectual procedure you perform as you move through a series of stages to produce a piece of writing.

Most writing tasks require us to plan and gather data and reflect on our own and others’ experience, then to draft and think it all through again as we are working. When we have a draft (second, third, forth, and on up) that really embodies all of our thoughts on the subject and says what we want to say, then it is time to improve it for the reader. Writing is a process that includes several different activities. Although these are usually called the “stages”, they are not as separate or linear as that term might suggest. Learning to write is a matter of learning about the stages and about efficient methods of working through each stage and combining them into an efficient process. We are going to investigate the stages in the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.

Prewriting

Prewriting is the term given to all of the activities that prepare us to write a first draft. These generally include defining the writing task, gathering material, and planning the first draft. Defining the writing task means clarifying for ourselves why we are writing (i.e. the purpose) and what our particular audience requires.

Gathering material may be as simple as recalling information or impressions we already have in our heads or as complex as reading everything in print on our subject or interviewing everyone involved in an event.

As soon as we have a writing task and some background information, we begin to generalize. Then we look for more data, which either supports our original generalization or prompts us to change or refine it. Thus, while we gather the facts we are beginning to plan the first draft. We are deciding what we will say and probably making notes about the order in which we will present various ideas and their support. Armed with these notes – which are often no more than a rough list – we are ready to try a first draft. Actually, there is no single point at which we should move from prewriting to drafting. Some people begin drafting as soon as they have gathered most of their material. They explain that drafting helps them see more clearly how their ideas fit together. Other people draw up elaborate and detailed plans before they begin drafting. Neither system is better than the other. Each of us just has to discover what works best for us. The early drafter, however, has to be willing to write many drafts, starting over until he or she comes to the right generalization and an effective organization. This might be called the trial-and-error method.

Obviously, we prewrite differently for different tasks. The technique that helps us gather information for one task may be no help at all with another.

Drafting

First drafts are made to be thrown out or at least buried beneath revisions, but they are an important part of the writing process. drafts serve two purposes: (1) they allow us to put all of our material on paper, and thus to see it all at once as we never could in our heads; (2) by putting all of our material before us, they enable us to evaluate it. As we draft we put our thoughts and our supporting data into words, sentences, and paragraphs, and we can see and hear it all together for the first time. if our writing task is relatively simple one, the firs draft may be close to what we want and may need only some fine-tuning. But with more complicated writing tasks, the first draft often brings to light some real or apparent contradictions or leaps in logic, or suggests to us that material should be added or rearranged. We may then be able to go right to a second draft in which we make the needed adjustments, or we may have to gather some more data or go back and think the subject through again. First drafts are never wasted, even if they end up in the trash. They serve to help us clarify our ideas and our means of presenting them.

Revising

To revise is to see again. When our ideas have been shaped into a draft, they are before us, and we can evaluate them. Of course, we have been reconsidering and making changes as far back as prewriting stage, and our ideas and the way we present them have been getting clearer. But once we have a draft, we can put more of our energy into clarifying and improving.

From this point on, we can concentrate on the effectiveness with which we present our writing. Here we are focusing entirely on our readers. Will they be able to follow the train of thought? Is there any chance they could fail to see how a sentence or paragraph follows from the one before it? Will they understand all the words? Is there anything they might object to? Developing this ability to imagine an audience’s reaction is essential to learning to write effectively. We all need someone else’s opinion on some of the things we write, even after we have become quite good at revising on our own.

Editing

It is both demanding and rewarding to think through a subject and to work out strategies that will present it most effectively to a reader. Compared to this activities, making sure that the words are correctly spelled and that the sentences are correctly constructed and punctuated may seem to be minor considerations. It does make sense not to worry about these things until the last draft.

Although sentence construction, spelling, and punctuation are the last details writers tend to, these “surface features” are what the readers encounter first. The words as they appear on the page are all the writers have to communicate their ideas to the readers. Generally readers suspect that writers who are careless or uninformed about small things are likely to be careless and uninformed about big things – like their ideas and opinions.

When readers notice misspelled words or when they have to read a sentence twice to figure it out, they are distracted from the writer’s train of thought. Thus, each of these surface errors decreases the power of writing to inform or entertain or persuade.

Prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing are each essential to successful writing. While it is convenient to discuss these stages individually and to focus on one stage at a time for certain exercises while you are learning to be a better writer, your own experience has shown you that the stages are not easily separable. Even as we draft, we may decide to return to the prewriting stage, and we may do some revising even if we are working on the first draft.