Writing process

Writing proce

Writing does not happen all at once. Writers go through several steps, each step bringing them closer to a finished piece of writing. All these steps together are known as thewriting process. This process has five stages:

• Prewrite: Find and explore your topic, find a main point, and support it.
• Plan: Arrange your ideas and make a plan.
• Draft: Write adraft, conclusion, and a title.
• Revise: Add, delete, and change sentences or ideas to make your writing stronger.
• Edit: Find and correct errors in grammar, word use, spelling, punctuation,and capitalization.

Purpose and Audience

Everything you write has a purpose, a point or reason. This depends on many things. Are you writing for a grade? For fun? For a job? All these are viablereasons for writing and will determine how your process evolves.

You must also consider the audience, those for whom you are writing. You will not write for the professor the same way you wouldwrite a love letter (I hope not!), so the type of audience you will have bears great influence on things like vocabulary, sentence structure, and tone.

Finding & Exploring Your Topic

A topic is whoor what you’re writing about. A good topic is one that interests you, that you know something about, and that is specific. Two steps are usually taken to make it useful:

• Narrowing: Focus onsmaller parts of a general topic.
• Exploring: Investigate what you already know about the narrowed topic to find out what you want to write about.

For example, the topic “pollution” could benarrowed down to “air pollution” or “noise pollution.”

Prewriting Techniques

Prewriting techniques are used to come up with ideas at any time during your writing: to find a topic, get ideas forwhat you want to say, and support ideas. Some types are:

• Brainstorming: List everything you know about a topic, eliminate useless ideas, and organize those which are useful.
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