Three Stages to Success in Writing
^ This picture is taken from Google Images "Hedge Maze Writing Process."
Writing is a creativity skill that helps writers to express their feeling by writing couple of paragraphs. They are several stages the writers have to follow to achieve wonderful developed papers. I hope this essay will be an efficient guide for college students who want to develop their writing skills.
First stage, “Freewriting is an informal method of exploring a subject by writing about it, freewriting (“writing freely”) can help you generate ideas and come up with materials for your draft (Richard Bullock, Maureen Goggin 199-204). To accomplish this stage, writers should write down anything pops up in their mind as quickly as they can, which relates to the topic they want to write, for five to ten minutes. Writers can do freewriting with several methods like looping, listing, clustering, cubing, questioning, outlining, and letter writing. In addition, in this stage, writers have to gather information, read and find research.
Second stage, this stage is called Drafting. Basically, Drafting is a complementary of the first stage. Writers will have to expand their freewriting into full sentences. In this stage, writers have to be in a comfortable situation which does not have any distractions and when they are in a good mood. The most important part in this stage is developing the outlines or the freewriting that have written in the first stage and the draft dose not have to be well organized in idea structure and sentences.
Third stage, assessing your own writing is a transition stage between the first and second stage. In this stage writers will have to start developing the “pre-final draft”. Writer will need to go between the first and second stage to gather information and organize their papers well. Also, writers should consider the rhetorical situations like purpose, audience, genre, and stance while preparing the draft.
Final stage, writers do not have to worry about the idea structures because they supposed to have done that early in the previous stage. Writers will have to look at the format of the papers like spell checking, grammar issues, and commas. This will be the final drafts for writers before they submit or publish their papers. Therefore, writers need to revise their papers or give them to other people to proof read them and give them feedback about the papers.
All the stages that I have discussed need at least one day per stage. However, writers cannot do that in one day and rush themselves if they want to have an ideal paper. Penguin hand book and the Norton book are great guides for college writers.
Understanding the Writing Process
Prewriting is the freewriting stage and it followed with the drafting stage which is the second stage of writing process. As it shown in the picture, prewriting and drafting are a transition stage, so writers will need to go back and forth between these two stages to have a great knowledge about the topic he or she wants to cover. Next stage is the revising stage “first draft” that is where the writers will be developing their ideas. Also, revising and proofreading are a transition stage. Finally, the last stage is where the writers have complated their drafts and ready to publish their papers.
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^ This picture is taken from Google Images " Step Up to Writing."
