The Writing Process

Unless you know for sure what you are going to write in each of the parts of your essay, experts advise to start from the main body of the paper. Include the most relevant and up-to-date information, expound it in logical order, and make sure one idea flows smoothly into another one, following the rule of coherence. Writing of the main body will be especially easy, if you have prepared an outline of the essay in advance. After the main body is completed, you can easily write an introduction and conclusion and praise yourself for being such an organized student.

The writing process is something that many people go through subconsciously. Writers are especially adept at following the writing process without thinking about it. Beginners or those who don’t write daily may find the writing process much easier if they consciously follow the five steps which are pre-writing, writing, revising, editing, and publishing. Each of these stages is important to the production of quality content whether it be an essay, a term paper, research project, script, poem, or novel.

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Quick Navigation through the Essay Writing Process

• Pre-Writing
• Essay Writing
• Revising an essay
• Editing
• Publishing/Submitting

Pre-Writing

In this stage you may need to read a book or other literature (for a book review, etc.) or do some research. This is the stage where you formulate your ideas. Some techniques you can use in this stage to gather ideas like mind mapping, brainstorming and free writing. Once you have the ideas down on paper, select the most relevant ideas and think about how to organize those ideas. This is an excellent point to do an outline which can help you to organize your ideas and structure your writing.

Essay Writing

In the stage of writing you take your ideas and structure from the pre-writing stage and completely focus on just writing.

Avoid doing any revising or editing and just keep writing until you reach the end of your outline.

This stage produces your first rough draft and is truly a crucial step in the writing process.

The most important part of this phase is just to push through until you have everything written out.

Don’t worry at all in this phase about spelling, punctuation, grammar or sentence length and structure.

Revising an essay

Revision is the third phase of the writing process. This is where you go back and read over what you’ve written. Read it out loud and check to see if it flows. You may need to rearrange sentences or paragraphs, add some details or remove repetitive or unnecessary wording. This is also the stage where you can rewrite any sentences that are lengthy or unclear.

Editing

The fourth stage of the writing process is editing. In this phase, you edit for things such as grammar, spelling and punctuation. You also review sentence structure and verb tense to make sure everything works well. If you find that you are doing a lot of rewriting or changes in wording, you may need to go back to the third stage.

Publishing/Submitting

The final stage is the publishing/submitting stage. This is where you check your writing and make sure that you’ve followed any instructions from your professor or other authority regarding formatting standards. So this would be where you make sure that margins are set correctly, font is readable and spacing is uniform. It’s always a good idea to do a final read through as well before you actually submit or publish your final essay.