My Writing Process

Altmann, Gerd "Chaos Regulation Shield Board Directory Sign Note" 8/29/2014 via Pixabay Public Domain Dedication License

 

Gears turn in the minds of 20 English students as they mechanically plan, write, and revise their assignments. The methodology of each student has been ingrained into his work since grade school. This methodology is called the writing process, and it is different for everyone. In A Student's Guide to First-Year Writing Section 3.2, four types of writers are described. It is important for us to examine and understand our writing processes, in order to improve the quality of our work.

1. Overall, I consider myself to be a sequential composer, but many portions of the other types of writers apply to me as well. While my approach to writing has always been free form, I spend roughly an equal amount of time planning, composing, and revising my work. I tend to bounce around, planning, writing, and revising in no particular order, until I finally arrive at a complete composition ready for final revision.

2. Elements of all four types of writers are visible in my process. My planning generally consists of drawn out contemplation of the prompt and consideration of what ideas I would like to develop. Like a heavy planner, I tend to "think about my writing in all sorts of places" however, my planning process is not nearly as concrete as that of a heavy planner. I also tend to write a large part of my text all at once, causing me to revise and rewrite parts of it, like a heavy reviser. Procrastination sometimes forces me to alter my writing process as well.

3. My writing process has proven to be successful up to this point however, it does have several downfalls. My sporadic planning, writing, and revising sometimes disturbs the flow of my work. My tendency to do most of my writing at once may cause me to exclude ideas, or perspectives that I might have included if I had spread out the process of composition. The main reason I stick to this process is that it allows me to easily shift the location of ideas within my work. I often write a sentence in a particular paragraph, and immediately realize that it would work better in another paragraph.

4. I am used to applying my method to process papers and analyses. The format of this English class is much different from other English classes I have taken. Due to the conventions of the genres that we will be working in, it may be beneficial for me to try to be more of a heavy planner. For example, by referring to Michael Hyatt's "Anatomy of an Effective Blog Post," I can create a template to make my blog posts more structured and readable.

I read the writing process posts on Nick's blog, and Mika's blog. Reading their posts made me realize that other students may use similar processes, but everyone has nuances in their processes that work for them. Everyone probably has room to grow as far as procrastination is concerned, but moving in the direction of heavy planning, and developing concrete planning methods may prevent procrastination.