writing process with meaning

The Writing Process

Definitions.

• Stages of the Writing Process
• Strategies for Good Writing

The Writing Process is a cycle of activities that you complete as you generate ideas, compose those ideas into a document or presentation, and refine those ideas. It is a recursive process, meaning that at any one stage in the process, you may find that you have to return to previous steps to review and refine your methods.

To read more about the elements of the Writing Process, we recommend the following resource:

• Dziak, M. (2018). Writing process (planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing). Salem Press Encyclopedia. The writing process is the series of actions taken by writers to produce a finished work. Writers, educators, and theorists have defined the writing process in many different ways, but it generally involves prewriting tasks, writing tasks, and post-writing tasks. More specifically, these tasks include planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing, in approximately that order.

Benefits of following the Writing Process include:

• The ability to revisit previous work completed to find new ideas or refine existing ones.
• A more organized finished product.
• A less stressful experience, which is one cause of Writer's Block .
• Less time spent in the drafting stage.
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Resources for Writers: The Writing Process

Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. It is known as a recursive process. While you are revising, you might have to return to the prewriting step to develop and expand your ideas.

• Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document. It includes thinking, taking notes, talking to others, brainstorming, outlining, and gathering information (e.g., interviewing people, researching in the library, assessing data).
• Although prewriting is the first activity you engage in, generating ideas is an activity that occurs throughout the writing process.
• Drafting occurs when you put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. Here you concentrate upon explaining and supporting your ideas fully. Here you also begin to connect your ideas. Regardless of how much thinking and planning you do, the process of putting your ideas in words changes them; often the very words you select evoke additional ideas or implications.
• Don’t pay attention to such things as spelling at this stage.
• This draft tends to be writer-centered: it is you telling yourself what you know and think about the topic.
• Revision is the key to effective documents. Here you think more deeply about your readers’ needs and expectations. The document becomes reader-centered. How much support will each idea need to convince your readers? Which terms should be defined for these particular readers? Is your organization effective? Do readers need to know X before they can understand Y?
• At this stage you also refine your prose, making each sentence as concise and accurate as possible. Make connections between ideas explicit and clear.
• Check for such things as grammar, mechanics, and spelling. The last thing you should do before printing your document is to spell check it.
• Don’t edit your writing until the other steps in the writing process are complete.

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The Writing Process

The writing process is something that no two people do the same way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to write. It can be a very messy and fluid process, and the following is only a representation of commonly used steps. Remember you can come to the Writing Center for assistance at any stage in this process. 

Steps of the Writing Process

Step 1: Prewriting

Think and Decide

• Make sure you understand your assignment. See  Research Papers  or  Essays
• Decide on a topic to write about. See   Prewriting Strategies  and  Narrow your Topic
• Consider who will read your work. See  Audience and Voice
• Brainstorm ideas about the subject and how those ideas can be organized. Make an outline. See  Outlines

Step 2: Research (if needed) 

• List places where you can find information.
• Do your research. See the many KU Libraries resources and helpful guides
• Evaluate your sources. See  Evaluating Sources  and  Primary vs. Secondary Sources
• Make an outline to help organize your research. See  Outlines

Step 3: Drafting

• Write sentences and paragraphs even if they are not perfect.
• Create a thesis statement with your main idea. See  Thesis Statements
• Put the information you researched into your essay accurately without plagiarizing. Remember to include both in-text citations and a bibliographic page. See  Incorporating References and Paraphrase and Summary  
• Read what you have written and judge if it says what you mean. Write some more.
• Read it again.
• Write some more.
• Write until you have said everything you want to say about the topic.

Step 4: Revising

Make it Better

• Read what you have written again. See  Revising Content  and  Revising Organization
• Rearrange words, sentences, or paragraphs into a clear and logical order. 
• Take out or add parts.
• Do more research if you think you should.
• Replace overused or unclear words.
• Read your writing aloud to be sure it flows smoothly. Add transitions.

Step 5: Editing and Proofreading

Make it Correct

• Be sure all sentences are complete. See  Editing and Proofreading
• Correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
• Change words that are not used correctly or are unclear.
• APA Formatting
• Chicago Style Formatting
• MLA Formatting  
• Have someone else check your work.

Do You Know The 7 Steps Of The Writing Process?

How much do you know about the different stages of the writing process? Even if you’ve been writing for years, your understanding of the processes of writing may be limited to writing, editing, and publishing. 

It’s not your fault. Much of the writing instruction in school and online focus most heavily on those three critical steps. 

Important as they are, though, there’s more to creating a successful book than those three. And as a writer, you need to know.   

The 7 Steps of the Writing Process

Read on to familiarize yourself with the seven writing process steps most writers go through — at least to some extent. The more you know each step and its importance, the more you can do it justice before moving on to the next. 

1. Planning or Prewriting

This is probably the most fun part of the writing process. Here’s where an idea leads to a brainstorm, which leads to an outline (or something like it). 

Whether you’re a plotter, a pantser, or something in between, every writer has some idea of what they want to accomplish with their writing. This is the goal you want the final draft to meet. 

With both fiction and nonfiction , every author needs to identify two things for each writing project: 

• Intended audience = “For whom am I writing this?”
• Chosen purpose = “What do I want this piece of writing to accomplish?”

In other words, you start with the endpoint in mind. You look at your writing project the way your audience would. And you keep its purpose foremost at every step. 

From planning, we move to the next fun stage. 

2. Drafting (or Writing the First Draft)

There’s a reason we don’t just call this the “rough draft,” anymore. Every first draft is rough. And you’ll probably have more than one rough draft before you’re ready to publish. 

For your first draft, you’ll be freewriting your way from beginning to end, drawing from your outline, or a list of main plot points, depending on your particular process. 

To get to the finish line for this first draft, it helps to set word count goals for each day or each week and to set a deadline based on those word counts and an approximate idea of how long this writing project should be. 

Seeing that deadline on your calendar can help keep you motivated to meet your daily and weekly targets. It also helps to reserve a specific time of day for writing. 

Another useful tool is a Pomodoro timer, which you can set for 20-25 minute bursts with short breaks between them — until you reach your word count for the day. 

3. Sharing Your First Draft

Once you’ve finished your first draft, it’s time to take a break from it. The next time you sit down to read through it, you’ll be more objective than you would be right after typing “The End” or logging the final word count. 

It’s also time to let others see your baby, so they can provide feedback on what they like and what isn’t working for them.

You can find willing readers in a variety of places: 

• Social media groups for writers
• Social media groups for readers of a particular genre
• Your email list (if you have one)
• Local and online writing groups and forums

This is where you’ll get a sense of whether your first draft is fulfilling its original purpose and whether it’s likely to appeal to its intended audience. 

You’ll also get some feedback on whether you use certain words too often, as well as whether your writing is clear and enjoyable to read. 

4. Evaluating Your Draft

Here’s where you do a full evaluation of your first draft, taking into account the feedback you’ve received, as well as what you’re noticing as you read through it. You’ll mark any mistakes with grammar or mechanics. 

And you’ll look for the answer to important questions: 

• Is this piece of writing effective/ Does it fulfill its purpose?
• Do my readers like my main character? (Fiction)
• Does the story make sense and satisfy the reader? (Fiction)
• Does it answer the questions presented at the beginning? ( Nonfiction )
• Is it written in a way the intended audience can understand and enjoy?

Once you’ve thoroughly evaluated your work, you can move on to the revision stage and create the next draft. 

More Related Articles

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How To Write A Book For Kindle About Your Expertise Or Passion

5. Revising Your Content

Revising and editing get mixed up a lot, but they’re not the same thing. 

With revising, you’re making changes to the content based on the feedback you’ve received and on your own evaluation of the previous draft. 

• To correct structural problems in your book or story
• To find loose ends and tie them up (Fiction)
• To correct unhelpful deviations from genre norms (Fiction)
• To add or remove content to improve flow and/or usefulness

You revise your draft to create a new one that comes closer to achieving your original goals for it. Your newest revision is your newest draft. 

If you’re hiring a professional editor for the next step, you’ll likely be doing more revision after they’ve provided their own feedback on the draft you send them. 

Editing is about eliminating errors in your (revised) content that can affect its accuracy, clarity, and readability.

By the time editing is done, your writing should be free of the following: 

• Grammatical errors
• Punctuation/mechanical and spelling errors
• Misquoted content
• Missing (necessary) citations and source info
• Factual errors
• Awkward phrasing
• Unnecessary repetition

Good editing makes your work easier and more enjoyable to read. A well-edited book is less likely to get negative reviews titled, “Needs editing.” And when it comes to books, it’s best to go beyond self-editing and find a skilled professional. 

A competent editor will be more objective about your work and is more likely to catch mistakes you don’t see because your eyes have learned to compensate for them. 

7. Publishing Your Final Product

Here’s where you take your final draft — the final product of all the previous steps — and prepare it for publication. 

Not only will it need to be formatted (for ebook, print, and audiobook), but you’ll also need a cover that will appeal to your intended audience as much as your content will. 

Whether you budget for these things or not depends on the path you choose to publish your book: 

• Traditional Publishing — where the publishing house provides editing, formatting, and cover design, as well as some marketing
• Self-Publishing — where you contract with professionals and pay for editing, formatting, and cover design. 
• Self-Publishing with a Publishing Company — where you pay the company to provide editing, formatting, and cover design using their in-house professionals.

And once your book is live and ready to buy, it’s time to make it more visible to your intended audience. Otherwise, it would fail in its purpose, too. 

Are you ready to begin 7 steps of the writing process?

Now that you’re familiar with the writing process examples in this post, how do you envision your own process?

While it should include the seven steps described here, it’ll also include personal preferences of your own — like the following: 

• Writing music and other ambient details
• Writing schedule
• Word count targets and time frames

The more you learn about the finer details of the writing process, the more likely you are to create content your readers will love. And the more likely they are to find it. 

Wherever you are in the process, our goal here is to provide content that will help you make the most of it. 

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Writing process, the writing process – research on composing.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - University of South Florida

The writing process refers to everything you do in order to complete a writing project. Over the last six decades, researchers have studied and theorized about how writers go about their work. They've found that the writing process can be seen in three main ways: (1) a series of steps or stages ; (2) a cognitive, problem-solving activity ; and (3) a creative, intuitive, organic, dialogic process that writers manage by listening to their inner speech and following their felt sense . Learn about scholarship on the writing process so you can understand how to break through writing blocks and find fluency as a writer, researcher, and thought leader.

Synonymous Terms

Composing process.

In writing studies , the writing process may also be known as the composing process . This may be due to the dramatic influence of Janet Emig’s (1971) dissertation, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders . Emig’s research employed think-aloud protocols and case-study methods to explore the composing processes of high school students.

Creative Process

In creative writing and literature, the writing process may be known as the creative process .

In the arts and humanities the term creative process is reserved for artistic works, such as paintings, sculptures, performance art, films, and works of literature.

Related Concepts

Composition Studies ; Creativity; Felt Sense ; Growth Mindset ; Habits of Mind ; Intellectual Openness ; Professionalism and Work Ethic ; Resilience ; Self Regulation & Metacognition

What is the Writing Process?

Research on composing processes conducted over the past 60 years has led to three major distinct ways of defining and conceptualizing the writing process:

• prewriting , invention , research , collaboration , planning , designing , drafting , rereading , organizing , revising , editing , proofreading , and sharing or publishing
• The writing process refers to cognitive, problem-solving strategies
• The writing process refers to the act of making composing decisions based on nonrational factors such as embodied knowledge , felt sense , inner speech, and intuition.

1. The writing process refers to writing process steps

The writing process is often characterized as a series of steps or stages. During the elementary and middle-school years, teachers define the writing process simply as prewriting , drafting , revising , and editing . Later, in high-school and college, as writing assignments become more challenging, teachers introduce additional writing steps: invention , research , collaboration , designing , organizing , proofreading , and sharing or proofreading.

2. The writing process refers to Problem-Solving Strategies

As an alternative to imagining the writing process to be a series of steps or stages that writers work through in linear manner, Linda Flower and John Hayes suggested in 1977 that writing should be thought of as a “thinking problem,” a “problem-solving process,” a “cognitive problem solving process,” or a “goal-directed thinking process.”

3. The writing process refers to the act of making composing decisions based on flow, felt sense and other elements of embodied knowledge

For some writers, viewing the writing process as a series of steps or problems feels to mechanistic, impersonal and formulaic. Rather than view that the writing process to be a series of writing steps or problem solving strategies , Sondra Perl , an English professor, suggests that composing is largely a process of listening to one’s felt sense — one’s “bodily awareness of a situation or person or event:

“A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling”. (Gendlin 1981, 32-33)

What are Writing Process Steps?

In elementary and middle schools in the U.S., the writing process is often simplified and presented at four or five key steps: prewriting , writing , revising , and editing –and sometimes and publishing or sharing . As students progress through school, the writing process is presented in increasingly complex ways. By high school, teachers present “the writing process steps” as

• Proofreading
• Sharing – Publishing

Is there one perfect way to work with the writing process?

People experience and define the writing process differently, according to their historical period, literacy history, knowledge of writing tools, media , genres — and more. One of the takeaways from research on composing is that we’ve learned writers develop their own idiosyncratic approaches to getting the work done. When it comes to how we all develop, research , and communicate information , we are all special snowflakes. For example,

• Hemingway was known for standing while he wrote at first light each morning.
• Truman Capote described himself as a “completely horizontal author.” He wrote lying down, in bed or on a couch, with a cigarette and coffee handy.
• Hunter S. Thompson wrote through the nights, mixing drinking and partying with composing
• J.K. Rowling tracked the plot lines for her Harry Potter novels in a data.
• Maya Angelou would lock herself away in a hotel room from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. so she has no distractions.

Furthermore, the steps of the writing process a writer engages in vary from project to project. At times  composing  may be fairly simple. Some situations  require little planning ,  research ,  revising  or  editing , such as

• a grocery list, a to-do list, a reflection on the day’s activity in a journal
• documents you routinely write, such as the professor’s letter of recommendation, a bosses’ performance appraisal, a ground-water engineer’s contamination report.

Over time, writers develop their own unique writing processes. Through trial and error, people can learn what works for them.

Composing  may be especially challenging

• when you are unfamiliar with the  topic ,  genre ,  medium ,  discourse community
• when the thesis/research question/topic  is complicated yet needs to be explained simply
• when you are endeavoring to synthesize other’s ideas and research
• when you don’t have the time you need to perfect the document.

What are the main factors that affect how writers compose documents?

Writers adjust their writing process in response to

• Writers assess the importance of the exigency, the call to write, before commiting time and resources to launching
• the writers access to information
• What they know about the canon, genre, media and rhetorical reasoning
• their writerly background
• the audience
• Writers assess the importance of the exigency, the call to write, before committing time and resources to working on the project.

Why does the writing process matter?

The writing processes that you use to compose documents play a significant role in determining whether your communications are successful. If you truncate your writing process, you are likely to run out of the time you need to write with clarity and authority .

• Studying the writing processes of successful writers can introduce you to new rhetorical moves, genres , and composing processes. Learning about the composing processes of experienced writers can help you learn how to adjust your rhetorical stance and your writing styles to best accomplish your purpose .
• By examining your writing processes and the writing processes of others, you can learn how to better manage your work and the work of other authors and teams.
• By recognizing that writing is a skill that can be developed through practice and effort, you can become more resilient and adaptable in your writing endeavors.

Do experienced writers compose in different ways than inexperienced writers?

Yes. Experienced writers engage in more substantive, robust writing processes than less experienced writers.

• Experienced writers tend to have more rhetorical knowledge and a better understanding of composing steps and strategies than inexperienced writers.
• Experienced writers tend to be more willing than inexperienced writers to make substantive changes in a draft, often making changes that involve rethinking the meaning of a text. Some professional writers may revise a document hundreds of times before pushing send or publishing it.
• Experienced writers engage in revision as an act of internal conversation, a form of inner speech that they have with themselves and an imagined other–the internalized target audience. In contrast, inexperienced writers tend to confuse editing for revision . They tend to make only a few edits to their initial drafts, focusing primarily on surface-level changes such as correcting grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors.
• Experienced writers are adept at working collaboratively, leveraging the strengths of team members and effectively coordinating efforts to produce a cohesive final product. Inexperienced writers may struggle with collaboration, communication, and division of labor within a writing team

What is Process Pedagogy?

Process pedagogy, which is also known as the process movement, emerged in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In The Making of Knowledge in Composition , Steve North (1987) links the emergence of process pedagogy to

• Sputnik and America’s concern it was falling behind Russia
• the GI Bill and the changing demographics of undergraduate students in the post-war era.

Additionally, process pedagogy emerged in response to dissatisfaction with traditional, product-oriented approaches to teaching writing. In the current-traditional paradigm of writing, the focus of the classroom was on “the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity, emphasis)” (Young, 1978, p. 25).

The process movement reflected a sea change on the part of middle schools, high schools, and universities in the U.S. Traditionally, classroom instruction focused on analysis and critique of the great works of literature: “The student is (a) exposed to the formal descriptive categories of rhetoric (modes of argument –definition, cause and effect, etc. — and modes of discourse — description, persuasion, etc.), (b) offered good examples (usually professional ones) and bad examples (usually his/her own) and (c) encouraged to absorb the features of a socially approved style, with emphasis on grammar and usage. We help our students analyze the product, but we leave the process of writing up to inspiration” (Flower and Hayes, 1977, p. 449).

In contrast to putting the focus of class time on analyzing great literary works,  the canon , process pedagogy calls for teachers to put the emphasis on the students’ writing:

• Students need help with prewriting , invention , research , collaboration , writing , designing , revising , organizing , editing , proofreading , and sharing
• Teachers do not comment on grammar and style matters in early drafts. Instead, they focus on global perspectives . They prioritize the flow of ideas and expression over correctness in grammar and mechanics.
• Students engage in prewriting and invention exercises to discover and develop new ideas
• Students repeatedly revise their works in response to self-critique , peer review , and critiques from teachers
• Teachers should provide constructive feedback throughout the writing process.

What does “teach the process and not the product mean”?

“Teach the process not the product ” is both the title of a Donald Murray (1972) article and the mantra of the writing process movement, which emerged during the 1960s.

The mantra to teach the process not the product emerged in response to the research and scholarship conducted by Donald Murray, Janet Emig, Peter Elbow, Ann Berthoff, Nancy Sommers, Sondra Perl, John Hayes and Linda Flower.

What does it mean to describe the writing process as recursive ?

The term  recursive writing process  simply means that writers jump around from one activity to another when  composing . For instance, when first drafting a document, a writer may pause to reread something she wrote. That might trigger a new idea that shoots her back to Google Scholar or some other database suitable for  strategic searching .

How do researchers study the writing process?

The writing process is a major subject of study of researchers and scholars in the fields of composition studies , communication, writing studies , and AI (artificial intelligence).

The writing process  is something of a black box: investigators can see  inputs  (e.g., time on task) or  outputs  (e.g.,  written discourse ), yet they cannot  empirically observe  the internal workings of the writer’s mind. At the end of the day investigators have to jump from what they observe to making informed guesses about what is really going on in the writer. Even if investigators ask a writer to talk out loud about what they are thinking as they compose , the investigators can only hear what the writer is saying: they cannot see the internal machinations associated with the writer’s thoughts. If a writer goes mute, freezes, and just stares blankly at the computer screen, investigators cannot really know what’s going on. They can only speculate about how the brain functions.

Research Methods

To study or theorize about the writing process, investigators may use a variety of research methods .

Doherty, M. (2016, September 4). 10 things you need to know about banyan trees. Under the Banyan. https://underthebanyan.blog/2016/09/04/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-banyan-trees/

Emig, J. (1967). On teaching composition: Some hypotheses as definitions. Research in The Teaching of English, 1(2), 127-135. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022783.pdf

Emig, J. (1971). The composing processes of twelfth graders (Research Report No. 13). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Emig, J. (1983). The web of meaning: Essays on writing, teaching, learning and thinking. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.

Ghiselin, B. (Ed.). (1985). The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences . University of California Press.

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. (1980). Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes. In L. W. Gregg, & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive Processes in Writing: An Interdisciplinary Approach (pp. 3-30). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  

Hayes, J. R. (2012). Modeling and remodeling writing. Written Communication, 29(3), 369-388. https://doi: 10.1177/0741088312451260

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. S. (1986). Writing research and the writer. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1106-1113. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.41.10.1106

Leijten, Van Waes, L., Schriver, K., & Hayes, J. R. (2014). Writing in the workplace: Constructing documents using multiple digital sources. Journal of Writing Research, 5(3), 285–337. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2014.05.03.3

Lundstrom, K., Babcock, R. D., & McAlister, K. (2023). Collaboration in writing: Examining the role of experience in successful team writing projects. Journal of Writing Research, 15(1), 89-115. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2023.15.01.05

National Research Council. (2012). Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.https://doi.org/10.17226/13398.

North, S. M. (1987). The making of knowledge in composition: Portrait of an emerging field. Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Murray, Donald M. (1980). Writing as process: How writing finds its own meaning. In Timothy R. Donovan & Ben McClelland (Eds.), Eight approaches to teaching composition (pp. 3–20). National Council of Teachers of English.

Murray, Donald M. (1972). “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” The Leaflet, 11-14

Perry, S. K. (1996).  When time stops: How creative writers experience entry into the flow state  (Order No. 9805789). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (304288035). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/when-time-stops-how-creative-writers-experience/docview/304288035/se-2

Rohman, D.G., & Wlecke, A. O. (1964). Pre-writing: The construction and application of models for concept formation in writing (Cooperative Research Project No. 2174). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Rohman, D. G., & Wlecke, A. O. (1975). Pre-writing: The construction and application of models for concept formation in writing (Cooperative Research Project No. 2174). U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388. doi: 10.2307/356600

Vygotsky, L. (1962).  Thought and language.  (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Eds.). MIT Press.  https://doi.org/10.1037/11193-000

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• Joseph M. Moxley

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Traditionally, in U.S. classrooms, the writing process is depicted as a series of linear steps (e.g., prewriting, writing, revising, and editing). However, since the 1980s the writing process has also...

In contrast to the prevailing view that the writing process refers to writing steps or problem solving strategies, a third view is that the writing process involves nonrational factors, such...

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People often think of writing in terms of its end product—the email, the report, the memo, essay, or research paper, all of which result from the time and effort spent in the act of writing. In this course, however, you will be introduced to writing as the recursive process of planning, drafting, and revising.

Writing is Recursive

You will focus as much on the process of writing as you will on its end product (the writing you normally submit for feedback or a grade).  Recursive means circling back; and, more often than not, the writing process will have you running in circles. You might be in the middle of your draft when you realize you need to do more brainstorming, so you return to the planning stage. Even when you have finished a draft, you may find changes you want to make to an introduction. In truth, every writer must develop his or her own process for getting the writing done, but there are some basic strategies and techniques you can adapt to make your work a little easier, more fulfilling and effective.

Developing Your Writing Process

The final product of a piece of writing is undeniably important, but the emphasis of this course is on developing a writing process that works for you. Some of you may already know what strategies and techniques assist you in your writing. You may already be familiar with prewriting techniques, such as freewriting, clustering, and listing. You may already have a regular writing practice.  But the rest of you may need to discover what works through trial and error. Developing individual strategies and techniques that promote painless and compelling writing can take some time. So, be patient.

A Writer’s Process: Ali Hale

Read and examine The Writing Process  by Ali Hale. Think of this document as a framework for defining the process in distinct stages: Prewriting, Writing, Revising, Editing, and Publishing. You may already be familiar with these terms. You may recall from past experiences that some resources refer to prewriting as planning and some texts refer to writing as drafting.

What is important to grasp early on is that the act of writing is more than sitting down and writing something. Please avoid the “one and done” attitude, something instructors see all too often in undergraduate writing courses. Use Hale’s essay as your starting point for defining your own process.

A Writer’s Process: Anne Lamott

In the video below, Anne Lamott, a writer of both non-fiction and fiction works, as well as the instructional novel on writing Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing , discusses her own journey as a writer, including the obstacles she has to overcome every time she sits down to begin her creative process. She will refer to terms such as “the down draft,” “the up draft,” and “the dental draft.”

As you watch, think about how her terms, “down draft,” “up draft,” “dental draft,” work with those presented by Hale’s The Writing Process . What does Lamott mean by these terms?  Can you identify with her process or with the one Hale describes? How are they related?

Also, when viewing the interview, pay careful attention to the following timeframe: 11:23 to 27:27 minutes and make a list of tips and strategies you find particularly helpful. Think about how your own writing process fits with what Hale and Lamott have to say. Is yours similar? Different? Is there any new information you have learned that you did not know before exposure to these works?

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: http://pb.libretexts.org/temp/?p=1387

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The Writing Process Explained: From Outline to Final Draft

May 30, 2023 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   Leave a Comment

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Writing is a messy process. Rarely do writers pick up their pen or open a fresh Google Doc and write everything start to finish. To take the genesis of an idea, consider the rhetorical situation, form that idea into whatever genre and format it needs to take, polish it, and then publish it requires a writing process to help make the non-linear process of writing more manageable and productive. 

Student writers often struggle with this process. They think one submitted draft means the writing process is complete. The lack of engagement in the writing process can hold a student’s writing in that rough draft limbo land forever.  

Empowering students to have agency in their own writing process can inspire amazing writing, increase engagement, and improve students’ metacognition. 

Writing Process 5 Steps

The writing process as we know it has 5 distinct stages. 

• Prewriting, research & planning: In this stage, the writer is mapping out the writing.

This may include brainstorming ideas, storyboarding the narrative arc, conducting any necessary research and making an outline. Anything that happens before actually writing is considered prewriting.

• Drafting: In the drafting stage, writers are making their first attempt at getting the words on the page. In this stage the writing isn’t expected to be perfect because the writer will eventually go back and make necessary changes. The goal in this stage is simply to get the ideas on paper. The drafting stage tends to be where student writers think the writing process ends. For many reasons, they lack the understanding that this is a first attempt and will require some finessing.

 But writing is definitely not done here.

• Revising: When revising, writers go back into their draft and make changes for content . 

This looks like reordering sentences, adding sentences, deleting sentences altogether, reordering paragraphs, etc.

In this stage, writers are really ripping their drafts to shreds, taking out what isn’t working and replacing it with more beautiful and functional content in order to better get their message across and accomplish the purpose of their piece.

• Editing & proofreading: During the editing and proofreading phase, writers are carefully combing through the piece to make sure everything is correct . Word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, punctuation, clarity…getting all of it right matters. 

Sometimes in this stage it’s helpful to have an extra set of eyes on the draft because it can be difficult for us to always spot errors in our own writing.

• Publishing: Publishing can look very different for every writer. In a classroom, publishing may just mean, I’m finished and I’m going to turn this into my teacher now and she’s going to post it on the class Padlet . It could also mean sharing it with a collaborative writing group or submitting to the school’s literary magazine. It could also mean pitching the piece to a publication or presenting it to a community group. Basically, in this step, the writer is ready to show off their writing to the world. 

Teaching the Writing Process

Students need explicit instruction and time to practice the writing process. Time of course is one of our most precious resources in the classroom, so how can we make the most efficient use of it when teaching the writing process?

 Here’s what I’ve found to be particularly helpful:

Use the language of the writing process: Be intentional about using the language of the writing process in your daily agendas, lessons, and feedback. This way when you tell a student something like, “Today you need to focus on prewriting for your upcoming argumentative essay” or “This writing project needs some more revision” or “Do you have your draft completed?” they know what stage of the writing process they’re in and what they need to be doing in that stage of the process.

Teaching writing as a recursive process: The writing process is recursive. 

We (and by we I just mean all of us writers out there) can bounce back and forth from the drafting to the revision stage 15 times before moving on. We can also engage in deep and thoughtful prewriting only to abandon the idea before ever drafting because a better one came along and we decided to start prewriting and drafting for that idea. 

Breaking students of their bad habits is tough work, but helping students see writing as a recursive process will strengthen their final products and help them gain overall confidence in their writing. 

Write daily : Again, I know there are just not enough minutes in the day, but making writing a daily habit is so important. 

The writing process doesn’t just have to be used for long-form writing. 

If you use a daily quickwrite, journal prompt, or warmup, have students cycle through the writing process by jotting down a few ideas and making a quick outline before writing, writing, and then revising and editing before turning in or sharing with a shoulder partner. 

By being in the habit of writing every day, students will find their groove with their own process for writing and it will become second nature!

Model for students your process: Writing in front of students is Vulnerable (yes, with a capital V). I like writing and even I sometimes get nervous before putting my notebook under the document camera. But I try to make writing in front of my students something I do at least once weekly. I model for them my process, I think aloud what I’m going to write, how I want to write it, and they get to watch me write something, hate it, revise it, and cycle through the writing process. 

Status of the class for managing it all: Connor may need three days to organize his ideas in the prewriting stage while Ava only needs about 5 minutes to plan her writing and hit the ground running.

There is no time limit for being in a particular stage of the writing process (unless ya know, they’ve got their phone propped up behind their Chromebook watching Euphoria instead of writing, then we’ve got problems. But I digress…). 

Despite that knee jerk reaction to herd our students like cattle through the writing process, it needs to be differentiated for each writer in the room.

So how the heck do you manage that? 

Utilizing a status of the class for the writing process helps you keep track of where each writer in the room is and can also help you better plan small group or individual instruction and coaching.

 If you just do a quick Google search for the status of the class in the writing workshop, you’ll see approximately one million great ways to do it, but I particularly like the visual Stacy Shubitz at Two Writing Teachers created for her classroom.

Ideas for Brainstorming and Initiation

Check out these ideas to get students engaged in the writing process and shorten the time they stare at a blank page:

• Storyboarding: Draw out problems and solutions and organize them in a logical order.
• Alphabet boxes: See if you can come up with one idea for each letter of the alphabet.
• Heart Maps : Can be used for all writing genres!
• Keeping a writer’s notebook: Have all of your brilliant ideas living in one place. When a new one comes along, jot it down in the notebook!
• Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes and write. When the timer goes off, take a 5 minute break, reset the timer for 25 minutes, and continue writing.
• Stream of consciousness: Write whatever comes to mind about your spark of an idea for writing. When you’ve written all you have to say, use a reverse outline to organize your ideas and continue drafting or begin revising. 

Writing Process Stages

Break assignment up for students: Depending on your students’ skill levels, they may need you to break the assignment up into the stages of the writing process and assign one stage at a time.

Design cycle for STEM and PBL: The writing process is similar to the design cycle used for STEM and PBL ( yes, even engineers need to understand the writing process!).

Have students create their own goals and workflow calendar: In her book Project Based Writing , Liz Prather shares how she has students establish goals for their writing as part of the prewriting process as well as develop their own calendars using a reverse engineering process.

For example, if a student has 25 days and intends to create a poem about the changing seasons, they will need to break down the project into individual tasks and then map out on their calendar how many days they will need for each task. 

Wouldn’t it be amazing if by the end of the year students could move 100% autonomously through the writing process?!

Writing Process Revising v. Editing

What is the difference between revising and editing in the writing process? 

Revising focuses on content only. When you are revising your draft you may notice you are missing a comma or misspelled a word. That’s great! But in the revising stage, those observations don’t matter. Instead, you’re only focusing on making your mystery narrative more suspenseful or making your satirical article more humorous. 

In the editing stage is when you address those spelling, grammar, and mechanics errors. 

Oftentimes in the classroom, the editing phase of the writing process is merely relegated to peer editing, which usually looks like a student’s paper getting shipped off to another student and being told to magically edit it without any guidance. 

Peer editing often gets a bad rap, but I have found that peer editing does have some redeeming qualities if explicitly taught and done correctly . 

Other Misconceptions

Sometimes misconceptions about the writing process hold us back from being our best possible teacher selves and hold our writers back from being their best possible writing selves. So as we wrap up, let’s debunk some of these common misconceptions. 

• Only writers who have problems in their writing need feedback: Ummmmm noooo. Even Jodi Piccoult has a literary agent and a team of editors at her publishing house to make sure her writing is perfect before being published. If it’s good enough for the New York Times bestselling author, it’s good enough for all of us.
• Every piece of writing needs to go through the full cycle: While it would be totally ideal to take every possible idea we ever have for a writing project and then brainstorm it, research it, outline it, draft, revise, edit, and then hit publish, that’s not really realistic. It’s okay to give up on a piece, change your mind on your idea, or have 6 drafts before it’s ready to be edited!
• You need to use the same process each time: The writing process is intended to be flexible. 

Now listen, I fully believe students have to learn the rules of writing (writing process included!) before they can learn to break them. But each student’s process doesn’t have to be the same.

If someone in your classroom needs to fully brainstorm each writing assignment using a storyboard before writing and you have another who needs to write a stream of consciousness before getting organized, it’s all good! Allow students to find their own way in the writing process. That’s where the really good, authentic writing lives! 

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 19 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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Online Guide to Writing and Research

The writing process, explore more of umgc.

• Online Guide to Writing

Introduction

Every writer, whether inexperienced or seasoned, knows that the process can be overwhelming. Whether you are analyzing, reporting, or composing a poem for your creative writing class, writing demands that you expose your innermost thoughts to the scrutiny of others. While you write, concentrating on the writing process, rather than what others will think, can give you the confidence to focus on the task at hand. Although every writer’s process is unique, it usually involves a combination of 1) planning and prewriting, 2) writing, and 3) rewriting/revising.

The Big Picture

The prewriting and planning phase begins with an understanding of the big picture. If you are new to academic writing, it might be helpful to think about academic writing in a simple way; there are usually three parts:

1) Your position on the topic (prior, current, and future knowledge on the topic)

2) Expert ideas (formal research)

3) A union of those two 

Why this balance?

Neither excessive emphasis on your own ideas nor too much information from outside research will lead to well-balanced writing. While expectations are different in every discipline and class, and you should always ask your professor what is preferred, your writing should include mostly your ideas, in a formal tone, with scholarly research that supports and supplements your argument. In other words, your voice carries the argument and flow of any written piece.  

Keeping the big picture in mind as you dive into the phases ahead will result in a smoother writing process, while hopefully reaching the main goals of any writing assignment: engaging meaningfully with your topic, demonstrating your knowledge, and educating your audience.

Planning and Prewriting

The purpose of the planning and prewriting phase is to explore your topic from different angles, connect to your own thoughts about the topic, come upon new ideas, and identify new relationships between concepts. When planning and prewriting, you will (click on the arrows):

Study your assignment expectations or writing prompt closely.

Brainstorm your own ideas on the chosen topic., conduct casual research to familiarize yourself with the topic., add these thoughts to a prewriting strategy., add formal research and notes to your chosen prewriting strategy., writing and rewriting.

Writing and rewriting phases allow you to implement your planning and the results of your experimentation while prewriting. You implement your strategy, working out the details and fine-tuning your thoughts. In the rewriting , or revising, phase, you review what you have written and consider how and where your writing can be improved.

It’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect writing process, and you can always edit and polish your thoughts later. Being passionate about your chosen topic can also help motivate you to get started. Write. Generate ideas. Revise later. Try to have fun with it!

Key Takeaways

Planning/prewriting, writing, and revising help organize and guide your writing process.

Academic writing consists of 1) your ideas 2) expert ideas 3) connections between the two.

The writing process is unique to each individual and need not necessarily follow a strict order.

The overall goal in writing is to engage in the pursuit of knowledge so you can share it with others.

Mailing Address: 3501 University Blvd. East, Adelphi, MD 20783 This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . © 2022 UMGC. All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Table of Contents: Online Guide to Writing

Chapter 1: College Writing

How Does College Writing Differ from Workplace Writing?

What Is College Writing?

Why So Much Emphasis on Writing?

Chapter 2: The Writing Process

Doing Exploratory Research

Getting from Notes to Your Draft

Prewriting - Techniques to Get Started - Mining Your Intuition

Prewriting: Targeting Your Audience

Prewriting: Techniques to Get Started

Prewriting: Understanding Your Assignment

Rewriting: Being Your Own Critic

Rewriting: Creating a Revision Strategy

Rewriting: Getting Feedback

Rewriting: The Final Draft

Techniques to Get Started - Outlining

Techniques to Get Started - Using Systematic Techniques

Thesis Statement and Controlling Idea

Writing: Getting from Notes to Your Draft - Freewriting

Writing: Getting from Notes to Your Draft - Summarizing Your Ideas

Writing: Outlining What You Will Write

Chapter 3: Thinking Strategies

A Word About Style, Voice, and Tone

A Word About Style, Voice, and Tone: Style Through Vocabulary and Diction

Critical Strategies and Writing

Critical Strategies and Writing: Analysis

Critical Strategies and Writing: Evaluation

Critical Strategies and Writing: Persuasion

Critical Strategies and Writing: Synthesis

Developing a Paper Using Strategies

Kinds of Assignments You Will Write

Patterns for Presenting Information

Patterns for Presenting Information: Critiques

Patterns for Presenting Information: Discussing Raw Data

Patterns for Presenting Information: General-to-Specific Pattern

Patterns for Presenting Information: Problem-Cause-Solution Pattern

Patterns for Presenting Information: Specific-to-General Pattern

Patterns for Presenting Information: Summaries and Abstracts

Supporting with Research and Examples

Writing Essay Examinations

Writing Essay Examinations: Make Your Answer Relevant and Complete

Writing Essay Examinations: Organize Thinking Before Writing

Writing Essay Examinations: Read and Understand the Question

Chapter 4: The Research Process

Planning and Writing a Research Paper

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Ask a Research Question

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Cite Sources

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Collect Evidence

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Decide Your Point of View, or Role, for Your Research

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Draw Conclusions

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Find a Topic and Get an Overview

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Manage Your Resources

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Outline

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Survey the Literature

Planning and Writing a Research Paper: Work Your Sources into Your Research Writing

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found? - Human Resources

Research Resources: What Are Research Resources?

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found?

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found? - Electronic Resources

Research Resources: Where Are Research Resources Found? - Print Resources

Structuring the Research Paper: Formal Research Structure

Structuring the Research Paper: Informal Research Structure

The Nature of Research

The Research Assignment: How Should Research Sources Be Evaluated?

The Research Assignment: When Is Research Needed?

The Research Assignment: Why Perform Research?

Chapter 5: Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity

Giving Credit to Sources

Giving Credit to Sources: Copyright Laws

Giving Credit to Sources: Documentation

Giving Credit to Sources: Style Guides

Integrating Sources

Practicing Academic Integrity

Practicing Academic Integrity: Keeping Accurate Records

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material - Paraphrasing Your Source

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material - Quoting Your Source

Practicing Academic Integrity: Managing Source Material - Summarizing Your Sources

Types of Documentation

Types of Documentation: Bibliographies and Source Lists

Types of Documentation: Citing World Wide Web Sources

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - APA Style

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - CSE/CBE Style

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - Chicago Style

Types of Documentation: In-Text or Parenthetical Citations - MLA Style

Types of Documentation: Note Citations

Chapter 6: Using Library Resources

Finding Library Resources

Chapter 7: Assessing Your Writing

How Is Writing Graded?

How Is Writing Graded?: A General Assessment Tool

The Draft Stage

The Draft Stage: The First Draft

The Draft Stage: The Revision Process and the Final Draft

The Draft Stage: Using Feedback

The Research Stage

Using Assessment to Improve Your Writing

Chapter 8: Other Frequently Assigned Papers

Reviews and Reaction Papers: Article and Book Reviews

Reviews and Reaction Papers: Reaction Papers

Writing Arguments

Writing Arguments: Adapting the Argument Structure

Writing Arguments: Purposes of Argument

Writing Arguments: References to Consult for Writing Arguments

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Anticipate Active Opposition

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Determine Your Organization

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Develop Your Argument

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Introduce Your Argument

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - State Your Thesis or Proposition

Writing Arguments: Steps to Writing an Argument - Write Your Conclusion

Writing Arguments: Types of Argument

Appendix A: Books to Help Improve Your Writing

Dictionaries

General Style Manuals

Researching on the Internet

Special Style Manuals

Writing Handbooks

Appendix B: Collaborative Writing and Peer Reviewing

Collaborative Writing: Assignments to Accompany the Group Project

Collaborative Writing: Informal Progress Report

Collaborative Writing: Issues to Resolve

Collaborative Writing: Methodology

Collaborative Writing: Peer Evaluation

Collaborative Writing: Tasks of Collaborative Writing Group Members

Collaborative Writing: Writing Plan

General Introduction

Peer Reviewing

Appendix C: Developing an Improvement Plan

Working with Your Instructor’s Comments and Grades

Appendix D: Writing Plan and Project Schedule

Devising a Writing Project Plan and Schedule

Reviewing Your Plan with Others

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Chapter 3: The Writing Process, Composing, and Revising

3.1 The Writing Process

Sarah M. Lacy and Melanie Gagich

What is The Writing Process?

Donald M. Murray, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and educator, presented his important article, “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product,” in 1972. In the article, he criticizes writing instructors’ tendency to view student writing as “literature” and to focus our attentions on the “product” (the finished essay) while grading. The idea that students are producing finished works ready for close examination and evaluation by their instructor is fraught with problems because writing is really a process and arguably a process that is never finished.

Murray explains why writing is an ongoing process:

What is the process we [writing instructors] should teach? It is the process of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world. Instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness. (4)

You will find that many college writing instructors have answered Murray’s call to “teach writing as a process” and due to shifting our focus on process rather than product, you will find yourself spending a lot of time brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing. Embracing writing as a process helps apprehensive writers see that writing is not only about grammatical accuracy or “being a good writer.”

The Writing Process

The most important lesson to understand about the writing process, is that it is recursive, meaning that you need to move back and forth between some or all of the steps; there are many ways to approach this process.  Allowing yourself enough time to begin the assignment before it is due, will give you time to move from one step to the other, and back as needed.  Perhaps the easiest way to think about this process is as a series of steps that you can move from one to the other and back again.

The Writing Process in 6 Steps

The following steps have been adapted from the work of Paul Eschholz and Alfred Rosa, found in their book Subject & Strategy .  The authors focus on discussing writing as a series of steps that can be adapted to meet any writer’s needs; below, the steps have been modified to fit your needs as  first-year writers.  While reading through the steps below, remember that every writer has a unique approach to the writing process.  The steps are presented in such a way that allow for any writer to understand the process as a whole, so that they can feel prepared when beginning a paper.  Take special note of all the tips and guidance presented with each step, as well as suggested further reading, remembering that writing is a skill that needs practice: make sure to spend time developing your own connection to each step when writing a paper.  You can also watch an introductory video on the steps:

The detailed steps are as follows:

Step 1 – Understand the Assignment

Always read over the entire assignment sheet provided to you by your instructor.  Think of this sheet as a contract; by accepting the sheet, you are agreeing to follow all guidelines and requirements that have been provided.  This sheet is a direct communication from your instructor to you, laying out every expectation and requirement of an assignment.  Follow each to ensure you are conducting and completing the assignment properly.

See Section 3.2 for a closer look at how to use an assignment sheet.

Step 2 – Gather Ideas and Form Working Thesis

Once you understand the assignment, you will need to collect information in order to understand your topic, and decide where you would like the paper to lead.  This step can be conducted in various ways.  Researching to build content knowledge is always a good place to start this step, so make sure to check out Chapter 8: The Research Process for a more specified look at various research methods.

After you have conducted some research begin brainstorming.  You can do this in a variety of ways:

• Free Writing
• Listing ideas
• Generate a list of questions
• Clustering/ Mapping (creating a bubble chart)
• Create a basic outline

Then, you will want to formulate a Working Thesis .  A working thesis is different than the thesis found in a final draft : it will not be specific nor as narrowed.  Think of a working thesis as the general focus of the paper, helping to shape your research and brainstorming activities. As you will later spend ample time working and re-working a draft, allow yourself the freedom to revise this thesis as you become more familiar with your topic and purpose.

See Section 4.2: Creating a Thesis for more information on thesis statements.

Step 3 – Write a Draft

After completing Steps 1 and 2, you are ready to begin putting all parts and ideas together into a full length draft.  It is important to remember that this is a first/rough draft, and the goal is to get all of your thoughts into writing, not generating a perfect draft. Do not get hung up with your language at this point, focus on the larger ideas and content.

Organization is a very important part of this step, and if you have not already composed an outline during Step 2, consider writing one now.  The purpose of an outline is to create a logical flow of claims, evidence, and links before or during the drafting process; experiment with outlines to learn when and how they can work for you.

Outlines are great at helping you organize your outside sources, if you need to use some within a particular assignment.  Start by generating a list of claims (or main ideas) to support your thesis, and decide which source belongs with each idea, knowing that you may (and should) use your sources more than once, with more than one claim.

Step 4 – Revise the Draft(s)

This is the step in which you are likely to spend the majority of your time.  This section is different from simply “editing” or “proof reading” because you are looking for larger context issues; for example, this is when you need to check your topic sentences and transitions, make sure each claim matches the thesis statement, and so on.  Return to Steps 1 and 2 as needed, to ensure you are on the right track and your draft is properly adhering to the guidelines of the assignment.

The revision portion of the writing process is also where you will need to make sure all of your paragraphs are fully developed as appropriate for the assignment.  If you need to have outside sources present, this is when you will make sure that all are working properly together.  If the assignment is a summary, this is when you will need to double check all paraphrasing to make sure it correctly represents the ideas and information of the source text .

It is likely that your professor will instruct you to complete Peer Editing .   Learn more about this process in Section 3.4.

Step 5 – Proof-Read/Edit the Draft(s)

Once the larger content issues have been resolved and you are moving towards a final draft, work through the paper looking for grammar and style issues.  This step is when you need to make sure that your tone is appropriate for the assignment (for example, you will need to make sure you have remained in a formal tone for all academic papers), that sources are properly integrated into your own work if your assignment calls for them, etc. Consider using the checklist offered in Section 3.6 .

When entering the final step, go back to the assignment sheet, read it over once more in full, and then conduct a close reading.  Doing this will help you to ensure you have completed all components of the assignment as per your instructor’s guidance.

Step 6 – Turn in the Draft, Receive Feedback, and Revise (if needed)

Once your draft is completed, turned in, and handed back with edits from your instructor, you may have an opportunity to revise, and turn in again to help raise your grade.  As the goal of the FYW class is to improve your writing, this is an essential step to consider so that you get the most out of the course.  Ask your instructor for more detail.

Works Cited

Eschholz, Paul and Alfred Rosa. Subject & Strategy: A Writer’s Reader. 11th ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2007.

Text can refer to the written word: “Proofread your  text  before submitting the paper.” 

A text  refers to any form of communication, primarily written or oral, that forms a coherent unit, often as an object of study. A book can be a text, and a speech can be a text, but television commercials, magazine ads, website, and emails can also be texts: “Dieting advertisements formed one of the  texts we studied in my Sociology class.”

A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing by Sarah M. Lacy and Melanie Gagich is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Writing Process

  The Writing Process Explained

Understanding the writing process provides a student with a straightforward step-by-step procedure that they can follow. It means they can replicate the process no matter what type of nonfiction text they are asked to produce.

In this article, we’ll look at the 5 step writing process that guides students from prewriting to submitting their polished work quickly and easily.

While explaining each stage of the process in detail, we’ll suggest some activities you can use with your students to help them successfully complete each stage. 

THE STAGES OF THE WRITING PROCESS

The five steps of the writing process are made up of the following stages:

• Pre-writing: In this stage, students brainstorm ideas, plan content, and gather the necessary information to ensure their thinking is organized logically.
• Drafting: Students construct ideas in basic sentences and paragraphs without getting caught up with perfection. It is in this stage that the pre-writing process becomes refined and shaped.
• Revising: This is where students revise their draft and make changes to improve the content, organization, and overall structure. Any obvious spelling and grammatical errors might also be improved at this stage.
• Editing: It is in this stage where students make the shift from improving the structure of their writing to focusing on enhancing the written quality of sentences and paragraphs through improving word choice, punctuation, and capitalization, and all spelling and grammatical errors are corrected. Ensure students know this is their final opportunity to alter their writing, which will play a significant role in the assessment process.
• Submitting / Publishing: Students can share their writing with the world, their teachers, friends, and family through various platforms and tools.

Be aware that this list is not a definitive linear process, and it may be advisable to revisit some of these steps in some cases as students learn the craft of writing over time.

Daily Quick Writes For All Text Types

Our FUN DAILY QUICK WRITE TASKS will teach your students the fundamentals of CREATIVE WRITING across all text types. Packed with 52 ENGAGING ACTIVITIES

STAGE ONE: THE WRITING PROCESS

GET READY TO WRITE

The prewriting stage covers anything the student does before they begin to draft their text. It includes many things such as thinking, brainstorming, discussing ideas with others, sketching outlines, gathering information through interviewing people, assessing data, and researching in the library and online.

The intention at the prewriting stage is to collect the raw material that will fuel the writing process. This involves the student doing 3 things:

• Understanding the conventions of the text type
• Gathering up facts, opinions, ideas, data, vocabulary, etc through research and discussion
• Organizing resources and planning out the writing process.

By the time students have finished the pre-writing stage, they will want to have completed at least one of these tasks depending upon the text type they are writing.

• Choose a topic: Ensure your students select a topic that is interesting and relevant to them.
• Brainstorm ideas: Once they have a topic, brainstorm and write their ideas down, considering what they already know about the topic and what they need to research further. Students might want to use brainstorming techniques such as mind mapping, free writing, or listing.
• Research: This one is crucial for informational and nonfiction writing. Students may need to research to gather more information and use reliable sources such as books, academic journals, and credible websites.
• Organize your ideas: This can be challenging for younger students, but once they have a collection of ideas and information, help them to organize them logically by creating an outline, using headings and subheadings, or grouping related ideas.
• Develop a thesis statement: This one is only for an academic research paper and should clearly state your paper’s main idea or argument. It should be specific and debatable.

Before beginning the research and planning parts of the process, the student must take some time to consider the demands of the text type or genre they are asked to write, as this will influence how they research and plan.

PREWRITING TEACHING ACTIVITY

As with any stage in the writing process, students will benefit immensely from seeing the teacher modelling activities to support that stage.

In this activity, you can model your approach to the prewriting stage for students to emulate. Eventually, they will develop their own specific approach, but for now, having a clear model to follow will serve them well.

Starting with an essay title written in the center of the whiteboard, brainstorm ideas as a class and write these ideas branching from the title to create a mind map. 

From there, you can help students identify areas for further research and help them to create graphic organizers to record their ideas.

Explain to the students that while idea generation is an integral part of the prewriting stage, generating ideas is also important throughout all the other stages of the writing process.

STAGE TWO: THE WRITING PROCESS

PUT YOUR IDEAS ON PAPER

Drafting is when the student begins to corral the unruly fruits of the prewriting stage into orderly sentences and paragraphs. 

When their writing is based on solid research and planning, it will be much easier for the student to manage. A poorly executed first stage can see pencils stuck at the starting line and persistent complaints of ‘writer’s block’ from the students.

However, do encourage your students not to get too attached to any ideas they may have generated in Stage 1. Writing is thinking too and your students need to leave room for their creativity to express itself at all stages of the process.

The most important thing about this stage is for the student to keep moving. A text is written word-by-word, much as a bricklayer builds a wall by laying brick upon brick. 

Instill in your students that they shouldn’t get too hung up on stuff like spelling and grammar in these early stages. 

Likewise, they shouldn’t overthink things. The trick here is to get the ideas down fast – everything else can be polished up later.

DRAFTING TEACHING ACTIVITY

As mentioned in the previous activity, writing is a very complex process and modeling goes a long way to helping ensure our students’ success. 

Sometimes our students do an excellent job in the prewriting stage with understanding the text purpose, the research, and the planning, only to fall flat when it comes to beginning to write an actual draft.

Often, students require some clear modeling by the teacher to help them transition effectively from Stage 1 to Stage 2. 

One way to do this for your class is to take the sketches, notes, and ideas one of the students has produced in Stage 1, and use them to model writing a draft. This can be done as a whole class shared writing activity.

Doing this will help your students understand how to take their raw material and connect their ideas and transition between them in the form of an essay.

STAGE THREE: THE WRITING PROCESS

POLISH YOUR THINKING

In Stage two, the emphasis for the student was on getting their ideas out quickly and onto the paper. 

Stage three focuses on refining the work completed earlier with the reader now firmly at the forefront of the writer’s mind.

To revise, the student needs to cast a critical eye over their work and ask themselves questions like:

• Would a reader be able to read this text and make sense of it all?
• Have I included enough detail to help the reader clearly visualize my subject?
• Is my writing concise and as accurate as possible?
• Are my ideas supported by evidence and written in a convincing manner?
• Have I written in a way that is suitable for my intended audience?
• Is it written in an interesting way?
• Are the connections between ideas made explicit?
• Does it fulfill the criteria of the specific text type?
• Is the text organized effectively?

The questions above represent the primary areas students should focus on at this stage of the writing process. 

Students shouldn’t slip over into editing/proofreading mode just yet. Let the more minor, surface-level imperfections wait until the next stage.

REVISING TEACHING ACTIVITY

When developing their understanding of the revising process, it can be extremely helpful for students to have a revision checklist to work from.

It’s also a great idea to develop the revision checklist as part of a discussion activity around what this stage of the writing process is about.

Things to look out for when revising include content, voice, general fluency, transitions, use of evidence, clarity and coherence, and word choice.

It can also be a good idea for students to partner up into pairs and go through each other’s work together. As the old saying goes, ‘two heads are better than one’ and, in the early days at least, this will help students to use each other as sounding boards when making decisions on the revision process.

STAGE FOUR: THE WRITING PROCESS

CHECK YOUR WRITING

Editing is not a different thing than writing, it is itself an essential part of the writing process.

During the editing stage, students should keep an eagle eye out for conventional mistakes such as double spacing between words, spelling errors, and grammar and punctuation mistakes. 

While there are inbuilt spelling and grammar checkers in many of the most popular word processing programs, it is worth creating opportunities for students to practice their editing skills without the crutch of such technology on occasion.

Students should also take a last look over the conventions of the text type they are writing. 

Are the relevant headings and subheadings in place? Are bold words and captions in the right place? Is there consistency across the fonts used? Have diagrams been labelled correctly?

Editing can be a demanding process. There are lots of moving parts in it, and it often helps students to break things down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

Focused edits allow the student the opportunity to have a separate read-through to edit for each of the different editing points.

For example, the first run-through might look at structural elements such as the specific structural conventions of the text type concerned. Subsequent run-throughs could look at capitalization, grammar, punctuation , the indenting of paragraphs, formatting, spelling, etc.

Sometimes students find it hard to gain the necessary perspective to edit their work well. They’re simply too close to it, and it can be difficult for them to see what is on the paper rather than see what they think they have put down.

One good way to help students gain the necessary distance from their work is to have the student read their work out loud as they edit it.

Reading their work out loud forces the student to slow down the reading process and it forces them to pay more attention to what’s written on the page, rather than what’s in their head. 

It’s always helpful to get feedback from someone else. If time permits, get your students to ask a friend or other teacher to review their work and provide feedback. They may catch errors or offer suggestions your students haven’t considered.

All this gives the student a little more valuable time to catch the mistakes and other flaws in their work.

WRITING CHECKLISTS FOR ALL TEXT TYPES

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EDITING TEACHING ACTIVITY

Students must have a firm understanding of what they’re looking to correct in the editing process to edit effectively. One effective way to ensure this understanding is to have them compile an Editing Checklist for use when they’re engaged in the editing process.

The Editing Checklist can be compiled as a whole-class shared writing activity. The teacher can scribe the students’ suggestions for inclusion on the checklist onto the whiteboard. This can then be typed up and printed off by all the students.

A fun and productive use of the checklist is for the students to use it in ‘editing pairs’. 

Each student is assigned an editing partner during the editing stage of a writing task. Each student goes through their partner’s, work using the checklist as a guide, and then gives feedback to the other partner. The partner, in turn, uses the feedback in the final edit of their work.

STAGE FIVE: THE WRITING PROCESS

HAND IN YOUR WRITING

Now, it’s time for our students’ final part of the writing process. This is when they hand in their work to their teacher – aka you !

At this point, students should have one final reread of their work to ensure it’s as close to their intentions as possible, and then, finally, they can submit their work.

Giving the work over to an audience, whether that audience comes in the form of a teacher marking an assignment, publishing work in print or online, or making a presentation to classmates, can be daunting. It’s important that students learn to see the act of submitting their work as a positive thing.

Though this is the final stage of the writing process, students should be helped to see it for all it is. It is another step in the journey towards becoming a highly-skilled writer. It’s a further opportunity for the student to get valuable feedback on where their skills are currently at and a signpost to help them to improve their work in the future.

When the feedback comes, whether that’s in the form of teacher comments, grades, reviews, etc it should be absorbed by the student as a positive part of this improvement process. 

Submitting TEACHING Activity

This activity is as much for the teacher as it is for the student.

Sometimes, our students think of feedback as a passive thing. The teacher makes some comments either in writing or orally and the student listens and carries on largely as before. We must help our students to recognize feedback as an opportunity for growth.

Feedback should be seen as a dialogue that helps our students to take control of their own learning. 

For this to be the case, students need to engage with the feedback they’ve been given, to take constructive criticisms on board, and to use these as a springboard to take action. 

One way to help students to do this lies in the way we format our feedback to our students. A useful format in this vein is the simple 2 Stars and a Wish . This format involves giving feedback that notes two specific areas of the work that the student did well and one that needs improvement. This area for improvement will provide a clear focus for the student to improve in the future. This principle of constructive criticism should inform all feedback.

It’s also helpful to encourage students to process detailed feedback by noting specific areas to focus on. This will give them some concrete targets to improve their writing in the future.

VIDEO TUTORIAL ON THE WRITING PROCESS

And there we have it. A straightforward and replicable process for our students to follow to complete almost any writing task.

But, of course, the real writing process is the ongoing one whereby our students improve their writing skills sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word over a whole lifetime.

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Implementing the Writing Process

About this Strategy Guide

This strategy guide explains the writing process and offers practical methods for applying it in your classroom to help students become proficient writers.

Research Basis

Strategy in practice, related resources.

The writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising and editing, rewriting, publishing—mirrors the way proficient writers write. In using the writing process, your students will be able to break writing into manageable chunks and focus on producing quality material. The final stage, publishing, ensures that students have an audience. Students can even coach each other during various stages of the process for further emphasis on audience and greater collaboration during editing.  Studies show that students who learn the writing process score better on state writing tests than those who receive only specific instruction in the skills assessed on the test. This type of authentic writing produces lifelong learners and allows students to apply their writing skills to all subjects. Success in writing greatly depends on a student’s attitude, motivation, and engagement. The writing process takes these elements into account by allowing students to plan their writing and create a publishable, final draft of their work of which they can be proud. It addresses students’ need for a real audience and to take the time to draft and redraft their work. You can help your students think carefully about each stage of their writing by guiding them through the writing process repeatedly throughout the year and across various content areas.

The writing process involves teaching students to write in a variety of genres, encouraging creativity, and incorporating writing conventions. This process can be used in all areas of the curriculum and provides an excellent way to connect instruction with state writing standards. The following are ways to implement each step of the writing process:

• Prewriting—This step involves brainstorming, considering purpose and goals for writing, using graphic organizers to connect ideas, and designing a coherent structure for a writing piece. For kindergarten students, scribbling and invented spelling are legitimate stages of writing development; the role of drawing as a prewriting tool becomes progressively less important as writers develop. Have young students engage in whole-class brainstorming to decide topics on which to write. For students in grades 3-5, have them brainstorm individually or in small groups with a specific prompt, such as, “Make a list of important people in your life,” for example. Online graphic organizers might help upper elementary students to organize their ideas for specific writing genres during the prewriting stage. Examples are the Essay Map , Notetaker , or Persuasion Map .
• Drafting—Have students work independently at this stage. Confer with students individually as they write, offering praise and suggestions while observing areas with which students might be struggling and which might warrant separate conference time or minilessons.
• Revising and Editing—Show students how to revise specific aspects of their writing to make it more coherent and clear during minilessons. You can model reading your own writing and do a think aloud about how you could add more details and make it clearer. Teach students to reread their own work more than once as they think about whether it really conveys what they want to their reader. Reading their work aloud to classmates and other adults helps them to understand what revisions are needed. Your ELLs will develop greater language proficiency as they collaborate with their peers when revising.
• Rewriting—Have students incorporate changes as they carefully write or type their final drafts.

Rubrics help to make expectations and grading procedures clear, and provide a formative assessment to guide and improve your instruction. The Sample Writing Rubric , for example, can be used for upper elementary students.

As you work with your students to implement the writing process, they will begin to master writing and take it into all aspects of life. Peer review, with clear guidelines for students to give feedback on each other’s work, motivates students, allows them to discuss their writing with their peers, and makes the work load a little lighter for you. The Peer Edit with Perfection! PowerPoint Tutorial is a useful tool to teach students how to peer review and edit. You can also have students can edit their own work using a checklist, such as the Editing Checklist . Editing is when students have already revised content but need to correct mistakes in terms of spelling, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and word choice. Use minilessons, small-group lessons, or individual conferencing if necessary to make sure that students have made thoughtful changes to their writing content before moving on to the final draft.

• Publishing—Encourage students to publish their works in a variety of ways, such as a class book, bulletin board, letters to the editor, school newsletter, or website. The ReadWriteThink Printing Press tool is useful for creating newspapers, brochures, flyers and booklets. Having an authentic audience beyond the classroom gives student writing more importance and helps students to see a direct connection between their lives and their literacy development.
• Lesson Plans
• Student Interactives
• Calendar Activities

It's not easy surviving fourth grade (or third or fifth)! In this lesson, students brainstorm survival tips for future fourth graders and incorporate those tips into an essay.

Students are encouraged to understand a book that the teacher reads aloud to create a new ending for it using the writing process.

While drafting a literary analysis essay (or another type of argument) of their own, students work in pairs to investigate advice for writing conclusions and to analyze conclusions of sample essays. They then draft two conclusions for their essay, select one, and reflect on what they have learned through the process.

The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.

The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!

Students examine the different ways that they write and think about the role writing plays in life.

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• Kindergarten K

Writing based on Texts

Writing as product & process.

When you write based on a text, you need to consider both the end result as well as how you get to that end result. That is, you need to understand both product and process. Sometimes it’s easier to consider the end result—the product—first, to see where the process leads and to get a better sense of why the process contains certain steps.

Writing as Product

There are many types of writing that you may be expected to do for college: case studies, annotated bibliographies, papers that define a term or concept in depth, learning journals, and more. wrtiYou can link to the University of Maryland’s page on Writing Assignments Across the Curriculum to get a sense of the wide variety of writing that you may be doing in college.

However, one very standard product for college writing, whether or not that writing is based on reading, is an essay. Remember that an essay is a piece of writing that attempts to explain something, analyze something, or present insights. An essay’s purpose is to provide a written explanation of your own ideas, interpretations, and evaluations—your direct reflection, explanation, reaction, application, or analysis of a focused topic.

In order to provide insight, analysis, and/or interpretation, an essay needs a focus. Remember that essays are written for readers– you need to make it easy for your reader to find your main idea. An essay’s focus occurs in a thesis sentence, a sentence that provides your main idea or argument in succinct form. One way to think of a thesis sentence is that it’s an assertion, claim, or proposition that you then support with evidence and examples in order to prove the validity of that claim. The thesis sentence, which often comes toward the start of an essay, is the key idea of the whole essay, encapsulated in one sentence. When you’re asked to write an “essay” as a course assignment, most likely you will be asked to write a thesis-support essay.

Thesis-support essays are just what their name implies. They offer a thesis near the start of the essay, usually at the end of the introductory paragraph, and then follow with supporting ideas and information. Usually, each unit of support starts with a topic sentence which extracts an idea from the thesis and makes a point about that part of the thesis idea. (You will read more fully about thesis and topic sentences on another page of this text.)

Here’s a way to visualize a basic thesis-support essay:

The video below provides three formulas to apply in order to create the product of “essay.” Note that although there are an infinite number of valid deviations from this formula, having formulas is not always a bad place to start when you’re learning how to write an essay. If you understand the basic structure of an essay, you can then play with it, expand on it, and deviate from it once you become a more comfortable and sophisticated writer.

Writing as Process

Getting to the product doesn’t happen all at once, even if you do follow a formula. The video on this page shows a portion of the writing process—what happens in the middle when you’re composing an essay. It doesn’t show the preliminary or later parts of the process. As a writer, it helps to understand all parts of the process so that you can apply that process in your own way each time you need to create a written product.

Here’s an overview of stages within the process of writing an essay (and most other written products):

• Considering writing – involves identifying the context of the writing – your purpose, writing type, and intended audience – as an initial planning step
• Prewriting – includes many different ways of generating information for writing
• Creating a thesis/topic sentences/support – involves identifying your main insight or assertion to be supported, and identifying appropriate categories and types of support
• Writing the draft – involves developing those supporting categories with details, examples, and reasons, and ordering the categories of support. Also involves creating an introduction and conclusion, and drafting a complete piece of writing.
• Revising – involves reviewing and evaluating the draft for context, thesis, topic sentences, and support, as well as clarity of language and appropriateness of format, with your initial purpose and audience in mind.

You can think of a writing process as circular—it circles back on itself to end with the same considerations that you started with. Or you can think of a writing process as a series of conjoined circles, perhaps like a spiral, since often you don’t move through the process in a linear manner. Instead, at any one point, you may need to circle back to a previous stage.

However you choose to visualize “how writing happens,” just remember that it doesn’t happen all at once, and it certainly can happen differently, depending on the particular writing task. As you do more and more writing, you’ll develop your own variation of the process that’s comfortable for you.

• Writing as Product & Process, includes material adapted from College Writing; attribution below. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Project : Introduction to College Reading & Writing. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• College Writing, pages on Thesis Definition and Writing Process Overview. Authored by : Susan Oaks. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-esc-wm-englishcomposition1/ . License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• image of drawing that says Idea, To Do, Doing, Done. Authored by : Gerd Altmann. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : https://pixabay.com/photos/kanban-work-work-process-organize-4051777/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• video How to Write an Effective 5-Paragraph Essay. Authored by : David Taylor. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwjmMtTVO1g&t=1s . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video

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8.3 Drafting

Learning objectives.

• Identify drafting strategies that improve writing.
• Use drafting strategies to prepare the first draft of an essay.

Drafting is the stage of the writing process in which you develop a complete first version of a piece of writing.

Even professional writers admit that an empty page scares them because they feel they need to come up with something fresh and original every time they open a blank document on their computers. Because you have completed the first two steps in the writing process, you have already recovered from empty page syndrome. You have hours of prewriting and planning already done. You know what will go on that blank page: what you wrote in your outline.

Getting Started: Strategies For Drafting

Your objective for this portion of Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” is to draft the body paragraphs of a standard five-paragraph essay. A five-paragraph essay contains an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. If you are more comfortable starting on paper than on the computer, you can start on paper and then type it before you revise. You can also use a voice recorder to get yourself started, dictating a paragraph or two to get you thinking. In this lesson, Mariah does all her work on the computer, but you may use pen and paper or the computer to write a rough draft.

Making the Writing Process Work for You

What makes the writing process so beneficial to writers is that it encourages alternatives to standard practices while motivating you to develop your best ideas. For instance, the following approaches, done alone or in combination with others, may improve your writing and help you move forward in the writing process:

• Begin writing with the part you know the most about. You can start with the third paragraph in your outline if ideas come easily to mind. You can start with the second paragraph or the first paragraph, too. Although paragraphs may vary in length, keep in mind that short paragraphs may contain insufficient support. Readers may also think the writing is abrupt. Long paragraphs may be wordy and may lose your reader’s interest. As a guideline, try to write paragraphs longer than one sentence but shorter than the length of an entire double-spaced page.
• Write one paragraph at a time and then stop. As long as you complete the assignment on time, you may choose how many paragraphs you complete in one sitting. Pace yourself. On the other hand, try not to procrastinate. Writers should always meet their deadlines.
• Take short breaks to refresh your mind. This tip might be most useful if you are writing a multipage report or essay. Still, if you are antsy or cannot concentrate, take a break to let your mind rest. But do not let breaks extend too long. If you spend too much time away from your essay, you may have trouble starting again. You may forget key points or lose momentum. Try setting an alarm to limit your break, and when the time is up, return to your desk to write.
• Be reasonable with your goals. If you decide to take ten-minute breaks, try to stick to that goal. If you told yourself that you need more facts, then commit to finding them. Holding yourself to your own goals will create successful writing assignments.
• Keep your audience and purpose in mind as you write. These aspects of writing are just as important when you are writing a single paragraph for your essay as when you are considering the direction of the entire essay.

Of all of these considerations, keeping your purpose and your audience at the front of your mind is the most important key to writing success. If your purpose is to persuade, for example, you will present your facts and details in the most logical and convincing way you can.

Your purpose will guide your mind as you compose your sentences. Your audience will guide word choice. Are you writing for experts, for a general audience, for other college students, or for people who know very little about your topic? Keep asking yourself what your readers, with their background and experience, need to be told in order to understand your ideas. How can you best express your ideas so they are totally clear and your communication is effective?

You may want to identify your purpose and audience on an index card that you clip to your paper (or keep next to your computer). On that card, you may want to write notes to yourself—perhaps about what that audience might not know or what it needs to know—so that you will be sure to address those issues when you write. It may be a good idea to also state exactly what you want to explain to that audience, or to inform them of, or to persuade them about.

Writing at Work

Many of the documents you produce at work target a particular audience for a particular purpose. You may find that it is highly advantageous to know as much as you can about your target audience and to prepare your message to reach that audience, even if the audience is a coworker or your boss. Menu language is a common example. Descriptions like “organic romaine” and “free-range chicken” are intended to appeal to a certain type of customer though perhaps not to the same customer who craves a thick steak. Similarly, mail-order companies research the demographics of the people who buy their merchandise. Successful vendors customize product descriptions in catalogs to appeal to their buyers’ tastes. For example, the product descriptions in a skateboarder catalog will differ from the descriptions in a clothing catalog for mature adults.

Using the topic for the essay that you outlined in Section 8.2 “Outlining” , describe your purpose and your audience as specifically as you can. Use your own sheet of paper to record your responses. Then keep these responses near you during future stages of the writing process.

My purpose: ____________________________________________

____________________________________________

My audience: ____________________________________________

Setting Goals for Your First Draft

A draft is a complete version of a piece of writing, but it is not the final version. The step in the writing process after drafting, as you may remember, is revising. During revising, you will have the opportunity to make changes to your first draft before you put the finishing touches on it during the editing and proofreading stage. A first draft gives you a working version that you can later improve.

Workplace writing in certain environments is done by teams of writers who collaborate on the planning, writing, and revising of documents, such as long reports, technical manuals, and the results of scientific research. Collaborators do not need to be in the same room, the same building, or even the same city. Many collaborations are conducted over the Internet.

In a perfect collaboration, each contributor has the right to add, edit, and delete text. Strong communication skills, in addition to strong writing skills, are important in this kind of writing situation because disagreements over style, content, process, emphasis, and other issues may arise.

The collaborative software, or document management systems, that groups use to work on common projects is sometimes called groupware or workgroup support systems.

The reviewing tool on some word-processing programs also gives you access to a collaborative tool that many smaller workgroups use when they exchange documents. You can also use it to leave comments to yourself.

If you invest some time now to investigate how the reviewing tool in your word processor works, you will be able to use it with confidence during the revision stage of the writing process. Then, when you start to revise, set your reviewing tool to track any changes you make, so you will be able to tinker with text and commit only those final changes you want to keep.

Discovering the Basic Elements of a First Draft

If you have been using the information in this chapter step by step to help you develop an assignment, you already have both a formal topic outline and a formal sentence outline to direct your writing. Knowing what a first draft looks like will help you make the creative leap from the outline to the first draft. A first draft should include the following elements:

• An introduction that piques the audience’s interest, tells what the essay is about, and motivates readers to keep reading.
• A thesis statement that presents the main point, or controlling idea, of the entire piece of writing.
• A topic sentence in each paragraph that states the main idea of the paragraph and implies how that main idea connects to the thesis statement.
• Supporting sentences in each paragraph that develop or explain the topic sentence. These can be specific facts, examples, anecdotes, or other details that elaborate on the topic sentence.
• A conclusion that reinforces the thesis statement and leaves the audience with a feeling of completion.

These elements follow the standard five-paragraph essay format, which you probably first encountered in high school. This basic format is valid for most essays you will write in college, even much longer ones. For now, however, Mariah focuses on writing the three body paragraphs from her outline. Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” covers writing introductions and conclusions, and you will read Mariah’s introduction and conclusion in Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” .

The Role of Topic Sentences

Topic sentences make the structure of a text and the writer’s basic arguments easy to locate and comprehend. In college writing, using a topic sentence in each paragraph of the essay is the standard rule. However, the topic sentence does not always have to be the first sentence in your paragraph even if it the first item in your formal outline.

When you begin to draft your paragraphs, you should follow your outline fairly closely. After all, you spent valuable time developing those ideas. However, as you begin to express your ideas in complete sentences, it might strike you that the topic sentence might work better at the end of the paragraph or in the middle. Try it. Writing a draft, by its nature, is a good time for experimentation.

The topic sentence can be the first, middle, or final sentence in a paragraph. The assignment’s audience and purpose will often determine where a topic sentence belongs. When the purpose of the assignment is to persuade, for example, the topic sentence should be the first sentence in a paragraph. In a persuasive essay, the writer’s point of view should be clearly expressed at the beginning of each paragraph.

Choosing where to position the topic sentence depends not only on your audience and purpose but also on the essay’s arrangement, or order. When you organize information according to order of importance, the topic sentence may be the final sentence in a paragraph. All the supporting sentences build up to the topic sentence. Chronological order may also position the topic sentence as the final sentence because the controlling idea of the paragraph may make the most sense at the end of a sequence.

When you organize information according to spatial order, a topic sentence may appear as the middle sentence in a paragraph. An essay arranged by spatial order often contains paragraphs that begin with descriptions. A reader may first need a visual in his or her mind before understanding the development of the paragraph. When the topic sentence is in the middle, it unites the details that come before it with the ones that come after it.

As you read critically throughout the writing process, keep topic sentences in mind. You may discover topic sentences that are not always located at the beginning of a paragraph. For example, fiction writers customarily use topic ideas, either expressed or implied, to move readers through their texts. In nonfiction writing, such as popular magazines, topic sentences are often used when the author thinks it is appropriate (based on the audience and the purpose, of course). A single topic sentence might even control the development of a number of paragraphs. For more information on topic sentences, please see Chapter 6 “Writing Paragraphs: Separating Ideas and Shaping Content” .

Developing topic sentences and thinking about their placement in a paragraph will prepare you to write the rest of the paragraph.

The paragraph is the main structural component of an essay as well as other forms of writing. Each paragraph of an essay adds another related main idea to support the writer’s thesis, or controlling idea. Each related main idea is supported and developed with facts, examples, and other details that explain it. By exploring and refining one main idea at a time, writers build a strong case for their thesis.

Paragraph Length

How long should a paragraph be?

One answer to this important question may be “long enough”—long enough for you to address your points and explain your main idea. To grab attention or to present succinct supporting ideas, a paragraph can be fairly short and consist of two to three sentences. A paragraph in a complex essay about some abstract point in philosophy or archaeology can be three-quarters of a page or more in length. As long as the writer maintains close focus on the topic and does not ramble, a long paragraph is acceptable in college-level writing. In general, try to keep the paragraphs longer than one sentence but shorter than one full page of double-spaced text.

Journalistic style often calls for brief two- or three-sentence paragraphs because of how people read the news, both online and in print. Blogs and other online information sources often adopt this paragraphing style, too. Readers often skim the first paragraphs of a great many articles before settling on the handful of stories they want to read in detail.

You may find that a particular paragraph you write may be longer than one that will hold your audience’s interest. In such cases, you should divide the paragraph into two or more shorter paragraphs, adding a topic statement or some kind of transitional word or phrase at the start of the new paragraph. Transition words or phrases show the connection between the two ideas.

In all cases, however, be guided by what you instructor wants and expects to find in your draft. Many instructors will expect you to develop a mature college-level style as you progress through the semester’s assignments.

To build your sense of appropriate paragraph length, use the Internet to find examples of the following items. Copy them into a file, identify your sources, and present them to your instructor with your annotations, or notes.

• A news article written in short paragraphs. Take notes on, or annotate, your selection with your observations about the effect of combining paragraphs that develop the same topic idea. Explain how effective those paragraphs would be.
• A long paragraph from a scholarly work that you identify through an academic search engine. Annotate it with your observations about the author’s paragraphing style.

Starting Your First Draft

Now we are finally ready to look over Mariah’s shoulder as she begins to write her essay about digital technology and the confusing choices that consumers face. As she does, you should have in front of you your outline, with its thesis statement and topic sentences, and the notes you wrote earlier in this lesson on your purpose and audience. Reviewing these will put both you and Mariah in the proper mind-set to start.

The following is Mariah’s thesis statement.

Here are the notes that Mariah wrote to herself to characterize her purpose and audience.

Mariah chose to begin by writing a quick introduction based on her thesis statement. She knew that she would want to improve her introduction significantly when she revised. Right now, she just wanted to give herself a starting point. You will read her introduction again in Section 8.4 “Revising and Editing” when she revises it.

Remember Mariah’s other options. She could have started directly with any of the body paragraphs.

You will learn more about writing attention-getting introductions and effective conclusions in Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” .

With her thesis statement and her purpose and audience notes in front of her, Mariah then looked at her sentence outline. She chose to use that outline because it includes the topic sentences. The following is the portion of her outline for the first body paragraph. The roman numeral II identifies the topic sentence for the paragraph, capital letters indicate supporting details, and arabic numerals label subpoints.

Mariah then began to expand the ideas in her outline into a paragraph. Notice how the outline helped her guarantee that all her sentences in the body of the paragraph develop the topic sentence.

If you write your first draft on the computer, consider creating a new file folder for each course with a set of subfolders inside the course folders for each assignment you are given. Label the folders clearly with the course names, and label each assignment folder and word processing document with a title that you will easily recognize. The assignment name is a good choice for the document. Then use that subfolder to store all the drafts you create. When you start each new draft, do not just write over the last one. Instead, save the draft with a new tag after the title—draft 1, draft 2, and so on—so that you will have a complete history of drafts in case your instructor wishes you to submit them.

In your documents, observe any formatting requirements—for margins, headers, placement of page numbers, and other layout matters—that your instructor requires.

Study how Mariah made the transition from her sentence outline to her first draft. First, copy her outline onto your own sheet of paper. Leave a few spaces between each part of the outline. Then copy sentences from Mariah’s paragraph to align each sentence with its corresponding entry in her outline.

Continuing the First Draft

Mariah continued writing her essay, moving to the second and third body paragraphs. She had supporting details but no numbered subpoints in her outline, so she had to consult her prewriting notes for specific information to include.

If you decide to take a break between finishing your first body paragraph and starting the next one, do not start writing immediately when you return to your work. Put yourself back in context and in the mood by rereading what you have already written. This is what Mariah did. If she had stopped writing in the middle of writing the paragraph, she could have jotted down some quick notes to herself about what she would write next.

Preceding each body paragraph that Mariah wrote is the appropriate section of her sentence outline. Notice how she expanded roman numeral III from her outline into a first draft of the second body paragraph. As you read, ask yourself how closely she stayed on purpose and how well she paid attention to the needs of her audience.

Mariah then began her third and final body paragraph using roman numeral IV from her outline.

Reread body paragraphs two and three of the essay that Mariah is writing. Then answer the questions on your own sheet of paper.

• In body paragraph two, Mariah decided to develop her paragraph as a nonfiction narrative. Do you agree with her decision? Explain. How else could she have chosen to develop the paragraph? Why is that better?
• Compare the writing styles of paragraphs two and three. What evidence do you have that Mariah was getting tired or running out of steam? What advice would you give her? Why?
• Choose one of these two body paragraphs. Write a version of your own that you think better fits Mariah’s audience and purpose.

Writing a Title

A writer’s best choice for a title is one that alludes to the main point of the entire essay. Like the headline in a newspaper or the big, bold title in a magazine, an essay’s title gives the audience a first peek at the content. If readers like the title, they are likely to keep reading.

Following her outline carefully, Mariah crafted each paragraph of her essay. Moving step by step in the writing process, Mariah finished the draft and even included a brief concluding paragraph (you will read her conclusion in Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” ). She then decided, as the final touch for her writing session, to add an engaging title.

Writing Your Own First Draft

Now you may begin your own first draft, if you have not already done so. Follow the suggestions and the guidelines presented in this section.

Key Takeaways

• Make the writing process work for you. Use any and all of the strategies that help you move forward in the writing process.
• Always be aware of your purpose for writing and the needs of your audience. Cater to those needs in every sensible way.
• Remember to include all the key structural parts of an essay: a thesis statement that is part of your introductory paragraph, three or more body paragraphs as described in your outline, and a concluding paragraph. Then add an engaging title to draw in readers.
• Write paragraphs of an appropriate length for your writing assignment. Paragraphs in college-level writing can be a page long, as long as they cover the main topics in your outline.
• Use your topic outline or your sentence outline to guide the development of your paragraphs and the elaboration of your ideas. Each main idea, indicated by a roman numeral in your outline, becomes the topic of a new paragraph. Develop it with the supporting details and the subpoints of those details that you included in your outline.
• Generally speaking, write your introduction and conclusion last, after you have fleshed out the body paragraphs.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

The Writing Process

Making expository writing less stressful, more efficient, and more enlightening, search form, step 4: revise.

"Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost." —William Zinsser, On Writing Well

What does it really mean to revise, and why is a it a separate step from editing? Look at the parts of the word revise : The prefix re- means again or anew , and – vise comes from the same root as vision —i.e., to see. Thus revising is "re-seeing" your paper in a new way. That is why revising here refers to improving the global structure and content of your paper, its organization and ideas , not grammar, spelling, and punctuation. That comes last.

Logically, we also revise before we edit because revising will most certainly mean adding and deleting and rewriting sentences and often entire paragraphs . And there is no sense in editing text that you are going to cut or editing and then adding material and having to edit again.

Continue to step-by-step instructions for revising .

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Writing is a Process

Lisa Fink 05.24.15 Writing

“Writing is a process.”

Writing is not just the final, polished draft. Writing involves routines, skills, strategies, and practices, for generating, revising, and editing different kinds of texts. See the following resources from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org on the process of writing.

While working with younger students, the “ Implementing the Writing Process ” strategy guide from ReadWriteThink.org explains the writing process and offers practical methods for applying it in your classroom to help students become proficient writers. See the writing process come alive with this visual .

Students sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between the global issues of revision and the local ones of editing. This lesson plan from ReadWriteThink.org first invites students to read several fractured fairy tales. Then, students make a list of the ways the original stories have been revised—changed or altered, not just “corrected”—to begin building a definition of global revision. After students have written a “revised” story of their own, they revise again, focusing more on audience but still paying attention to ideas, organization, and voice. During another session, students look at editing as a way to polish writing, establishing a definition of revision as a multi-level process.

In Strategic Writing: The Writing Process and Beyond in the Secondary English Classroom , Deborah Dean shares her insights as a classroom teacher with a variety of classroom practices, assignments, and lesson plans. Readers will discover innovative ways to teach writing, including sections on inquiry; on drafting with genre, audience, and purpose in mind; and on revising and refining the products of writing.

A resource from College Composition and Communication simple states “Writing itself is a process with many kinds of subprocesses, and even though our writing processes are increasingly based on digital technologies, we still use process as the term describing our making of writing.”

Read all about the writing process with this group of resources collected for the National Day on Writing .

How do you use the NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing in your classroom?

Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

“Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter,” says  Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it’s formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters’ shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): NPR

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The Value of Values in Poverty Reduction

Anti-poverty programs in the developing world often sputter because they clash with local culture and values. But researchers are finding success with programs that align with the tenets of the communities they’re trying to help.

Inside Grants: Institute of Education Sciences Grant Funding

The Institute of Education Sciences and Educational Testing Services collaboration research grant is a $1,399,520 effort toward identifying evidence of collaborative problem solving skills.

APS Expands Career Resources, Professional Development in 2023

A new series of educational workshops and trainings in 2023 is designed to help psychological scientists further their careers inside and outside of academia, while fostering a more transparent and valid science on the global stage. 

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Writing Psychologically-Realistic Characters in Fiction

A psychiatrist-novelist reveals her writing methods..

Posted May 16, 2024 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• As readers, we usually want fictional characters to be both unique and psychologically realistic.
• Psychiatrist-novelists have a well of clinical experience teaching them how people feel, behave, and grow.
• Novelists have sometimes-unconscious reasons for choosing certain themes and characters to write about.

Good novelists create characters who are complex. unique, and have relatable human needs and feelings. Joyce Carol Oates is one of our best contemporary novelists, and has created a host of memorable characters. including a hippie, an imagined Marilyn Monroe, and a teenage boy. When she and I met and exchanged novels, she said: “You’re a psychiatrist and a novelist. What a great combination!”

There certainly are superb novelists who are also psychiatrists. Dr. Daniel Mason, for example, is both an inpatient psychiatrist and one of our finest contemporary writers of fiction. However, non- psychiatric physicians have also written psychologically rich characters. Dr. Abraham Verghese, for example, specializes in internal medicine. And many of the greatest novelists of all time who created complex characters: Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky were neither psychiatrists nor physicians.

So how, then, are psychiatrist novelists “a great combination"?

The advantages of being a psychiatrist-novelist

Humans are fascinated by other people and their behaviors. From earliest childhood , we listen to and read stories to show how people face challenging situations. We psychiatrists have an added advantage. In our clinical work, we are privileged to hear the most private thoughts and feelings of many people: their fears, the different ways they have tried to protect themselves in difficult and often traumatizing relationships and situations. We also see how they change and grow. When creating fictional characters, we have access to this well of knowledge to write imaginary but psychologically realistic people.

The challenges

When it comes down to the writing, though, physicians have a disadvantage. We're trained to write clinical case histories in a rigid format: presenting problem, history of present illness, past medical history, family history, and so on. This is totally unlike the process fiction authors must master to write characters that come alive on the page. We physicians must put aside that ingrained pattern of straightforward reporting if we are to write good fiction.

One psychiatrist-novelist’s process of writing

Is our process of writing fiction different from that of other novelists? What follows is my own method. I tend to think it is not; readers here may hazard their own guess.

Finding a topic gripping to the novelist

A novelist will spend countless hours in his/her imagination , even more writing sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, then even more rewriting. Because of this heavy expenditure of energy and time, we must find a topic that fascinates us so much we are willing (or needing) to invest the months and years necessary to write about it.

In my case, the idea for my novel of psychological suspense, The End of Miracles , came directly from my clinical work as a psychiatrist. Over a period of a few months, I was asked to see three women, each with an extended false pregnancy , a condition technically named pseudocyesis.

In addition to my clinical interest in evaluating and treating them, and my scientific interest in studying their hormone levels, I also thought: wouldn’t it be fascinating to write a novel in which, at some point, the main character develops pseudocyesis?

Why was this topic so appealing? Only during the course of writing did the realization of the likely roots of my fascination become apparent.

Having an overarching goal

I'd long harbored a creative need to write a novel. I also wanted to add an engrossing book to the world of literature in return for the pleasure I’ve received from reading fiction since my childhood. As a psychiatrist, I set myself additional goals . I wanted to show psychiatrists as they really are, not as the devious or incompetent stereotypes so often portrayed in books or films. I wanted to show that people who develop a serious mental illness are not that different from the rest of us.

Creating the characters

One method I used was to become an actor. I'd pretend to be a particular character and then "listen to" their inner monologue and dialogue. Probably the easiest chapters to write were about the psychiatrist in the novel. I simply imagined myself in my own office, sitting across from the main character, Margo, and having a therapeutic session with her.

Writing the psychological roots of behaviors

It was very important to me to make Margo’s thoughts and actions grow out of her psychology. Once I'd written enough to know her feelings and behaviors in the present, I added to prior chapters instances of thoughts and experiences that were roots of the current ones.

In the process of writing this way, I discovered a possible clue as to why I was so attracted to the theme of a false pregnancy. A memory came to mind: 5-year-old me seeing my mother very pregnant, seeing babies in fancy carriages, seeing women nursing their babies. Likely I wanted a baby then, too—yet never got to have one. But these women who’d developed false pregnancies with distended abdomens had found a solution to that problem! Why hadn’t I thought of that? Well, now I had.

Writing suspensefully

I’ve read many thrillers, and now used the techniques I’d observed in them to create tension and a page-turning experience for my own readers. In the most suspenseful sections, I kept chapter lengths short and hinted in their last sentences that something crucial was about to happen,

Sending the book out into the world

Publication was a joy mixed with an unexpected momentary sense of loss. In a way, it resembled what it’s like when a baby is born: for many months, you’ve had a private, intimate relationship, and then it ends. Similarly, when my novel was published, there was a brief sadness about sending it out into the world to make new relationships with its readers.

The audiobook re-creation

When we read a book, we're not actually reading the same book as its other readers. We filter what we see on the page through our own experiences and understanding of the world. With an audiobook, the narrator voices the story and the characters through their own response to the text.

For The End of Miracle 's Audible audiobook, I listened to many of their narrators read aloud sections of other books and of my own before choosing the one whose voice resonated best with the story. I would be entrusting this person to be a kind of co-creator with me. It’s been gratifying to read comments of those who’ve both read and listened, writing they very much liked the print version and loved the audiobook. Then, I am reassured that I made the right choice.

The effect on one listener, though, was unexpected and humorous. My teenage grandson wrote on his Facebook page: “After reading the novel I listened to the audiobook and it was a relief to hear the phrase ‘egg showered in sperm’ in someone else’s voice instead of my grandmother’s.”

Starkman, M. (2016) The End of Miracles: A Novel, She Writes Press.

Monica Starkman, MD is a professor of psychiatry emerita at the University of Michigan. Her novel The End of Miracles is a suspenseful story about a woman who unravels psychologically after harrowing infertility and a tragic miscarriage, the shocking choices she makes, and the psychiatrists and close ones who try to save her.

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My kids' middle names are places my husband and I have loved. I didn't want to name them after people.

• Choosing my kids' names was a difficult decision. 
• I wanted them to have middle names that would help them discover themselves and feel grounding. 
• In the end, my husband and I chose middle names that were places we loved and remembered fondly.

I gave birth to my first child — a daughter — in New York City in April of 2020, just after the start of the pandemic. Yes, the experience was terrifying, but almost as terrifying was deciding on her name.

I was fairly confident with the choice of her first name. But when it came to choosing a middle name for my first daughter (and later, for my second), I wanted to give myself time to think and to dream about my offspring's identity and legacy. Middle names are often viewed as the name of lesser importance, but I wanted my choices to be a gateway for both discovering and for remembering their center, or rather, the core of their being.

I wanted to choose something that reflected my love of mother nature and could also serve as a guidepost for my child. I also didn't want my daughter to feel that she had to live up to someone else's life or influence by naming her after another person . And I loved the idea of her having a physical place that she could go to and revisit throughout her life — even with her own children and grandchildren, someday — that she'd feel she had a personal stake in.

I thought about all the places I'd been

As I contemplated a middle name, I thought about the many beautiful places I had visited in my life, and narrowed it down to one special region of the United States: the Appalachian mountains. And then, I remembered this breathtaking hike that I had taken once in college at the Roan Mountain Balds in Tennessee.

The hike is a part of the Appalachian Trail and boasts awe-inspiring panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. In June, the rhododendron blooms attract folks from all over the country. The "roan," or reddish color of the mountaintops during this time of year, has been what many claim to be the origin of the mountain's namesake. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited.

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"Roan" was the perfect choice for my first child — Roan Mountain held such a special place in my heart, and I knew that one day, it would hold a special place in her heart, too.

When I got pregnant again, the process started over

I had my second child just 21 months after my first, and again, while I was pregnant, we found ourselves in the tedious process of choosing yet another first and middle name . By this time, our family had relocated from New York City to Asheville, North Carolina.

We'd traded our 500-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in Queens for an old home that was double the size of our previous, surrounded by all shades of natural green. I don't take for granted the fact that I can step right outside onto the front porch and inhale crisp mountain air; even three years later, it still hasn't gotten old.

However, despite our decision being the right one for our family, my husband and I started to find ourselves grieving our pre-kid, city life. We missed weekends spent leisurely walking in parks throughout the metropolis, sipping fancy coffees, and finishing the night eating out and drinking at restaurants that served up cuisines and cocktails from all over the world.

We had spent six years posing as city slickers, but whenever we needed a break, we pressed pause and retreated up the Metro-North. Just an hour or so on the train and we were in a whole different world, hiking and recharging. Without a doubt, the Hudson River Valley quickly became one of our homes-away-from-home — another special place in our book of life.

And so, as the clock ticked during the third trimester of my second pregnancy and the panic of choosing a first and middle name commenced, my husband offered the possibility of "Hudson" as our second child's middle name, and without any hesitation, I agreed. It was perfect, and when we were surprised with a second daughter, it fit her well.

I hope that my girls will delight in, not only the sounds of their names , but the pieces of their mother and father that reside within them — that make up who they are as people on this wondrous earth. By selecting these names, our hope is that our children will visit and re-visit these places and fondly remember the memories and stories told by us, their parents.

We also hope to bestow our love of nature as well as the lesson that it is constantly teaching us: that it is constant, and life is variable. We want them to appreciate the beauty and joy that life offers even in its most fleeting moments. A sure-fire way we can do that is by immersing ourselves in nature.

If our children do so, in return, they will be afforded a fuller life — one that is not perfect but is worth living, and that, I believe, is one of the greatest gifts we can give to our kids.

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Billie Eilish’s ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’: All 10 Songs Ranked

The pop star's third studio album dropped at midnight May 17.

By Hannah Dailey

Hannah Dailey

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At just 22 years old, it’s hard to believe that Billie Eilish is already a veteran pop star who’s three albums and seven years deep into her career — but here we are. Hit Me Hard and Soft , her third and most skillful studio LP yet, arrived promptly at midnight Friday (May 17), bringing with it 10 new tracks about life under the spotlight, complicated friendships-turned-romances and Eilish embracing her sexuality.

From the emotional accountability on “Wildflower” to the self-scrutinizing “Skinny,” Eilish’s latest set finds her fully in possession of the narrative maturity she was grasping at on her 2021 sophomore effort Happier Than Ever , which spent three weeks atop the Billboard 200 . But with gothic allusions to death and criminal activity on songs like “Birds of a Feather” and “The Diner,” and shades of blue adding darker dimension to even the happiest moments on the album, the project also makes good on the star’s promise that Hit Me Hard and Soft would mark a return to the charms of her No. 1 hit debut record When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

“This whole process has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was,” she told Rolling Stone in April of making the album with her brother and producer, Finneas, whose best work to date is displayed on HMHAS . “I’ve been grieving her. I’ve been looking for her in everything, and it’s almost like she got drowned by the world and the media. I don’t remember when she went away.”

Keep reading to see how Billboard ranks the songs on Eilish’s new LP Hit Me Hard and Soft , from worst to best, below.

"Bittersuite"

The album’s penultimate track relies more on Finneas’ artful production tricks than it does on any lyrics or message, but it’s definitely a fun listen. Its fragmented pacing may also intentionally reflect the impatience Eilish feels with maintaining a relationship under the demands of her public-facing job, which she addresses on lines like, “I gotta be careful, gotta watch what I say/ God I hope it all goes away.”

"The Diner"

A feverish daydream of a song, “The Diner” marks a less-serious break in the album, akin to Eilish’s early hit “Bellyache,” on which she fantasized about toting her friends’ dead bodies around in the back of her car. This time, she imagines herself as a delusional stalker — perhaps even embodying one of her own rabid fans — breaking and entering into her target’s home in the hopes of someday getting married.

“I came in through the kitchen looking for something to eat,” she croons. “I left a calling card so they would know that it was me.”

Named after Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away heroine, “Chihiro” has a lot going on. A groovy slap bass and distorted synth twinkles underscore one of the hookiest moments of the whole album, when Eilish sings, “Did you take my love away from me?” As a whole, though, the song creates more of a video game-ready ambience as opposed to obeying a more traditional structure.

"L'Amour de Ma Vie"

“L’Amour de Ma Vie” calls back to the cheekiness of Eilish’s earliest tracks, like “Bitches Broken Hearts” or “Party Favor.” “I need to confess I told you a lie,” she sings ruefully on the first half of the distinctly two-part track, “when I said you were the love of my life.”

On “Blue,” Eilish and Finneas reprise many of the motifs introduced throughout the album — similar to “Goodbye” on When We All Fall Asleep — including the glorious string break on the first track, “Skinny.” Swelling and cumulative, the album’s swan song is all about accepting circumstances for what they are, for all their beauty, pain and everything in between.

And yes, you heard her correctly at the very end. “When can they hear the next one?” Eilish asks in a matter-of-fact speaking voice, possibly hinting at a second album coming very soon.

“Lunch” finds Eilish fantasizing about a girl she wants to — as she puts it — eat for lunch, singing over an instantly addictive beat that eventually devolves into an all-out club-ready dance banger. It marks the musician’s first time explicitly expressing her attraction to women in a song, a task she takes on joyously and freely.

"Birds of a Feather"

“Birds of a Feather” is full of clichés; even its title is one of the English language’s oldest idioms. But coming from a young star whose fame was propelled by her quirky outfits, edgy lyrical subjects and brash interview responses, such a simplistic love song is actually quite refreshing. Critics of Eilish’s vibrato-heavy signature vocal style will be silenced upon hearing her belt with her full diaphragm on this sentimental track, which is perfectly primed for a placement in a summery teen rom-com or two.

Eilish opens Hit Me Hard and Soft with a song that bridges the reflection she did on Happier Than Ever about stardom and self-image with the more nuanced perspective she’s gained since then. Three years later, the star seems to have made peace with her station while still being honest about its drawbacks, describing it here as being like “a bird in a cage” or “a dog in a dog pound.”

“Twenty-one took a lifetime/ People say I look happy just because I got skinny,” she continues before letting listeners in on a little secret, one of the thesis statements of Hit Me Hard and Soft : “But the old me is still me/ And maybe the real me and I think she’s pretty.”

"The Greatest"

Fans of the back half of “Happier Than Ever” are bound to love “The Greatest.” It starts as an unimposing ballad about yearning for more appreciation and reciprocation in a relationship, but eventually ramps up into a cinematic rock free-for-all, in which Eilish once again lets loose for a moment of glorious belting. This time, Eilish takes overdue stock of her own self-worth, instead of just focusing on her ex’s shortcomings, making this a self-love anthem as much as it is a breakup song.

"Wildflower"

“Wildflower” boasts some of Eilish’s most mature songwriting yet, in terms of both craft and perspective. Soulful and gloomy, it makes telling a complex story look simple, with the singer quietly suffering as she comes undone obsessing over her partner’s ex-girlfriend.

Lyrics like “I’d never ask who was better/ ‘Cause she couldn’t be more different from me/ Happy and free in leather,” for instance, are both straightforward and visceral, while the line “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me/ So I kept it to myself” is devastating in context. And as opposed to some of the other standout songs on HMHAS , Eilish’s narration is the centerpiece, not the production.

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CI/CD, which stands for  continuous integration (CI)  and  continuous delivery (CD) , creates a faster and more precise way of combining the work of different people into one cohesive product. In application development and operations ( DevOps ), CI/CD streamlines application coding, testing and deployment by giving teams a single repository for storing work and automation tools to consistently combine and test the code to ensure it works.

The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is an agile DevOps workflow focused on a frequent and reliable software delivery process. The methodology is iterative, rather than linear, which allows DevOps teams to write code, integrate it, run tests, deliver releases and deploy changes to the software collaboratively and in real-time.

A key characteristic of the CI/CD pipeline is the use of automation to ensure code quality. As the software changes progress through the pipeline, test automation is used to identify dependencies and other issues earlier, push code changes to different environments and deliver applications to production environments. Here, the automation’s job is to perform quality control, assessing everything from performance to API usage and security. This ensures the changes made by all team members are integrated comprehensively and perform as intended.

The ability to automate various phases of the CI/CD pipeline helps development teams improve quality, work faster and improve other DevOps metrics.

Automation of software releases—from initial testing to the final deployment—is a significant benefit of the CI/CD pipeline. Additional benefits of the CI/CD process for development teams include:

• Reducing time to deployment through automation:  Automated testing makes the development process more efficient, reducing the length of the software delivery process. In addition,  continuous deployment  and automated provisioning allow a developer’s changes to a cloud application to go live within minutes of writing them.
• Decreasing the costs associated with traditional software development:  Fast development, testing and production (facilitated by automation) means less time spent in development and, therefore, less cost.
• Continuous feedback for improvement:  The CI/CD pipeline is a continuous cycle of build, test and deploy. Every time code is tested, developers can quickly take action on the feedback and improve the code.
• Improving the ability to address error detection earlier in the development process:  In continuous integration, testing is automated for each version of code built to look for issues integration. These issues are easier to fix the earlier in the pipeline that they occur.
• Improving team collaboration and system integration . Everyone on the team can change code, respond to feedback and quickly respond to any issues that occur.

What is continuous integration?

The CI/CD process begins with  continuous integration (CI) . CI allows developers to work independently, creating their own coding “branch” to implement small changes. As the developer works, they can take snapshots of the source code, typically within a versioning tool like Git. The developer is free to work on new features; if a problem comes up, Git can easily revert the codebase to its previous state.

The work of individuals is then pushed into an automated system that uses scripts to build and test the code changes. After the build stage, a CI server compiles the source code changes into the master code or “trunk”.

Instead of writing code independently and submitting to the master once a month, which can lead to arduous work fixing bugs and poor version control, the CI/CD development process lets teams submit code changes more frequently. This  continuous testing  offers faster bug fixes, ensures functionality and, ultimately, results in better collaboration and software quality.

For a deeper dive into continuous integration, check out Eric Minick’s video on the subject: 

The next step in the pipeline is  continuous delivery (CD) , which puts the validated code changes made in continuous integration into select environments or code repositories, such as GitHub. Here, the operations team can deploy them to a live production environment. The software and APIs are tested, and errors are resolved through an automated process. In the final step of the CD process, the DevOps team receives a notification about the latest build, and they manually send it to the deploy stage.

The goal of the continuous delivery pipeline stage is to deploy new code with minimal effort, but still allow a level of human oversight.

The CD in the CI/CD process also stands for  continuous deployment . Continuous deployment automatically releases code changes to end-users after passing a series of predefined tests, such as integration tests that test code in a copycat environment to ensure code integrity.

The difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is in the level of automation used in software or app releases. In continuous delivery, code automatically moves to production-like environments for further testing and quality assurance, and human intervention is required to move into production following successful tests. In continuous deployment, automation goes further. Once the code passes testing, the deployment to production happens automatically—there is no human approval needed.

For a closer look at the difference between continuous delivery and continuous deployment, check out this video:

How an organization applies the CI/CD pipeline and makes a decision on whether to use continuous delivery or deployment depends on its business needs. Continuous deployment is best for DevOps teams with a fast development lifecycle, such as for teams building ecommerce sites and SaaS platforms. Continuous deployment allows teams to release new or updated software often and as quickly as possible. Because changes are deployed to the public automatically, this type of continuous deployment pipeline is typically used only by DevOps teams that have a proven process.

For teams that may not need to release updates as frequently in their workflow—such as for those building healthcare applications—continuous delivery is typically the preferred option. It is slower but offers another layer of oversight to ensure functionality for the end-users.

From source code to production, these phases make up the development lifecycle and workflow of the CI/CD pipeline:

• Build:  This phase is part of the continuous integration process and involves the creation and compiling of code. Teams build off of source code collaboratively and integrate new code while quickly determining any issues or conflicts.
• Test:  At this stage, teams test the code. Automated tests happen in both continuous delivery and deployment. These tests could include integration tests, unit tests and regression tests.
• Deliver:  Here, an approved codebase is sent to a production environment. This stage is automated in continuous deployment and is only automated in continuous delivery after developer approval.
• Deploy:  Lastly, the changes are deployed and the final product moves into production. In continuous delivery, products or code are sent to repositories and then moved into production or deployment by human approval. In continuous deployment, this step is automated.

When selecting CI/CD tools, the focus should be on how to optimize and automate the software development process. An effective CI/CD pipeline uses open-source tools for integration, testing and deployment. Correct configuration of your CI/CD process also impacts the success of the software development pipeline.

The most common open-source CI/CD tool is Jenkins. Jenkins is an automated CI server written in Java and used for automating CI/CD steps and reporting. Other open-source tools for integration include Travis CI and CircleCI.

Integrated development environments (IDE), such as GitHub or AWS CodeCommit, help developers create, maintain and track software packages, while platforms like GitLab seek to provide the IDE within a comprehensive platform that includes other tools.

When operating in a cloud environment, teams use containers like  Docker  for packaging and shipping applications, and they use Kubernetes for orchestration. While Kubernetes isn’t strictly for the CI/CD pipeline, it is used in many CI/CD workflows.

When it comes to being enterprise-ready,  IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery  is the cloud infrastructure and experience made for DevOps. Build, deploy and manage your applications with toolchains, pipelines and tool integrations designed for DevOps with the power of the cloud.

Less downtime, the ability to edit code from anywhere, assess deployment risk and identify source code vulnerabilities are key benefits of DevOps teams on the cloud. IBM  Cloud® Continuous Delivery offers cloud-native DevOps tools as a service, fully hosted and managed on the IBM Cloud.

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More From Forbes

‘destiny 2’ says ‘veiled threats’ will emerge this week, what’s that mean.

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When we hit reset next Tuesday, it will be just two weeks until the launch of The Final Shape in Destiny 2 , and as part of its process to get anyone and everyone onboarded before that expansion hits, Bungie appears to have something planned in-game.

The “Next Week in Destiny” popup on Friday had an opening line that read “Veiled threats emerge.” Now, players are wondering what exactly that means, and there are a few best-case scenarios, and perhaps a few more realistic ones. Here are what I think are the options.

The Dread Are Roaming – If “veiled threats” are emerging, this would be a really cool time to debut the Dread a bit early, the new enemy race that Bungie has built out, extended from Tormentors and Rhulk, and becoming fully its own thing. One thing we do not know about the Dread is how and why exactly they exist, and why now, so this could be some clue as to that.

The “roaming” bit of this is a reference to the Destiny 1 House of Wolves expansion that had an in-game event that people still cite to this day as a cool example where future content could be previewed. In it, Fallen “Wolves” (House of Wolves) roamed the landscape you could hunt, and you could even farm them for unreleased weapons. The idea here is that maybe they could do the same thing with the Dread. Again, this is in the “best-case scenario” tier where you should probably not get your hopes up.

The Best Gaming Laptops Under $1,000: Boost Your Games For Less

Nezarec Dread Minions – This was a cool theory I saw in my comments that when Nezarec arrives as the final Pantheon boss, that instead of the enemies that aided him before, he will instead of Dread, essentially his Tormentor-ish kin, aiding him as the “modification” for his challenge, a step beyond the “two Rhulks” we saw last week, and another very, very cool way to debut the Dread, this time for mainly elite players running Pantheon, who would get the early sneak peak. That would be a pretty fantastic surprise.

Final Mission – Sure, again, there could be some new mission starring the Dread. But at this point, we should also open up the possibility that there is maybe (probably) not going to be a debut of the Dread at all, and “veiled threats” may mean the general threat of the Witness and his forces in some new mission or cutscene. The Veil, of course, is also the big Lightfall MacGuffin that could have something to do with the terminology here. This may be the most likely option.

I want to believe this has something to do with an early reveal of The Dread. I normally would say there’s probably a zero percent chance this happens, but Bungie has been in full-on “wish-granting” mode for a while now, and people have been saying “why don’t we do anything like the Wolves are Roaming anymore?” for years now. So I’m not ruling it out. But something is happening, in any case, and unlike the last few weeks, I’ll be there.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .

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