What is the Writing Process?

“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic” – J.K. Rowling

If the quote seems familiar to you, we won’t be surprised. After all, this line has been penned in one of the most acclaimed book series around the world; that’s right, we’re talking about none other than the Harry Potter series. If you’re a Potterhead, you must’ve at least marveled once at the writing process Rowling must’ve followed to come up with such a magnificent piece of writing.

Some people dream of becoming writers or even published authors from a young age. Such aspiring dreams are mostly side effects of being a bookworm or knowing someone dearly who’s an avid fan of reading books. The person could be a relative or even a friend of yours. However, it’s their love and appreciation of books that can lead you in becoming an aspiring author.

Once you put pen to paper, your thoughts start flowing so rapidly that sometimes even you can have a hard time catching up with them. Whereas some days will be like drought and you haven’t seen rain in aeons which is, of course, a metaphor for facing the legendary writer’s block. So no, the writing process itself is not an easy feat.

However, the answers you seek are right here. So don’t sweat. Once you get to know all the tips and tricks we have in store for you to avoid writer’s block and for smooth sail writing, you’d want to keep coming back for more.

Getting the hang of the writing process

First of all, one of the biggest and easiest mistakes you can do is underestimating yourself. Sure, you might be complimented by your friends all the time and there’s absolutely no need for you to self-doubt about the writing abilities you possess; however, we can understand how far from reality the truth is.

Once you’re handed a piece of writing to work upon, it can be overwhelming. At first sight of it, your instincts might tell you to opt for a flight or fight response. But the only way possible for you to master the steps of the writing process is by confronting all your fears. You have to make sure that you opt for a chance that you’ll not regret. Hence, it is entirely up to you to whether you stand your ground or not.

Another thing that you might take very lightly is the thought process that eventually evolves into your writing process. You might find the notion highly ridiculous as who has to actually sit and think about what they’re going to write. The time spent thinking over the topic could be some very precious time being wasted by doing a useless thing such as mulling things over. However, by streamlining the content using a writing process, you’re able to be more coherent and concise in your writing.

Let’s further talk about how these steps of the writing process can prove vital for your future if you’re going to become a published author. There are a few steps that are considered incorrect in the writing process; they are as follows:

The incorrect 5 steps of writing process

As a student, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of working in a lab, you might’ve been handed a set of instructions the first time you entered the lab that you must strictly adhere to. In fact, there must’ve been a penalty or so for violating the rules as well. Writing processes are somewhat similar to that sans the penalties, of course.

Basically, the stages of the writing process allow you to compartmentalize and strategize according to the need of your essay. You see, once you get to hear about the announcement that you are assigned to write an essay, it is likely that you may tremble from head to toe, especially if you’re not fond of writing.

Because whenever you’d turn up your essays, you’d either get abysmal marks because you failed to get the gist of it and as a result, you get even more dejected about having to do future essays. Furthermore, the reason you don’t perform well is that you often find yourself riddled with anxiety over choosing the right topic.

Followed by hastily going through the instructions provided, picking a topic randomly based on the amount of time you’ve got left and the interest you have in the said topic. Just like any average student who’s not a nerd, you’d start the essay a bit too late and you could end up compromising the quality of your work. Not only that, you’d do a half-hearted job and just can’t wait to get it over with it.

Now to put it nicely, if what we described happens to be the 5 steps of writing process you follow, we’d like to inform you that you’re going about it all wrong.

But why opt for the steps of writing process?

As mentioned earlier, if you don’t like writing at all or find the task too cumbersome, you’d be riddled with anxiousness and stress. Neither of which are going to benefit you while writing your essay in the least. You’d write a sentence, erase it, scribble something else over it and the cycle keeps going on because the fact of the matter would be that you yourself don’t know what thoughts you’d like to put on paper. It’s all jumbled up.

The writing process steps would allow you to organize your thoughts efficiently. Much like when you go to a grocery store, you use the list of things you made earlier to recall the stuff you have to buy; therefore, you don’t forget any essential item nor waste any valuable time. Similarly, by allotting a certain amount of time to each section of your essay, you’d be able to churn out a piece of writing that you won’t be embarrassed by whilst turning it in. Further down, we’ll discuss the steps of the writing process.

The quality of your essay determines your writing skills. If you’re organized, you will find it easier to work on the essay. Furthermore, your teacher will also be able to garner that you spend a good deal of time on the essay and eventually grade you, keeping that in mind.

5 steps of writing process

Now, these are the 5 steps of writing process that you must follow to write a decent essay which you can flaunt later on to everyone you know and earn praises for a beautiful piece of work.

Step#1: The Prewriting

Your mindset before working on any essay should be ‘Let’s focus on tackling this thing using baby steps’. This stage requires you to come up with a topic that shall be the foundation of your essay.

If you’re not assigned any topic, it means you’re likely to have fun if you opt for a topic of interest or curiosity. Bear this in mind, don’t pick something that renders you speechless and out of much content to write, nor a topic too broad that might exceed your word count.

The next stage is to conduct thorough research for information gathering purposes for your essay. Grab every relevant material you can find in terms of the topic. Look up reliable sources online or in books. To make sure your essay is not too dry, put in a few statistics to make your points come across.

Step#2: Planning and outlining

In the writing process stages, planning and outlining happen to be crucial steps. It can be defined as the way in which you structure your essay to depart knowledge in an effective manner. If you do not plan the outline of your essay beforehand, you might end up with a haphazard piece of writing.

Structuring your essay will allow a reader to grasp and understand the depth of your essay easily. You can mention the main points and then go on to discuss them in detail instead of vice versa. Furthermore, the writing process welcomes any improvisations considering they prove fruitful to the essay. Based on that, you can continue to make changes to your structure as long as you’re writing.

In case you feel like you’ve added too many paragraphs and not enough breathing space within your essay, you may cover a few of the main ideas using bullet points. This way, you can summarize your essay instead of loading it with paragraphs.

Step#3: Writing a first draft

Once you are sure what you’re going to write, you may get down to it. Given the structure you have at hand, you should have an idea that it’s quite a straightforward approach. Write your introduction, which should be a concise summary of your entire content apart from the conclusion, of course. You have to keep the readers hanging to each word of yours till the very end.

While writing a first draft, begin with one point and conclude the point within that paragraph. If not, divide the point into two paragraphs so that you don’t make the one paragraph look too stuffy. Write the main body of your essay, followed by a conclusive end.

Keep in mind that this first write-up will be considered as a draft. Assign yourself a deadline so that you can make edits and modifications way ahead of your actual essay deadline.

Step#4: Redrafting and revising

The writing process steps allows you to ensure that you’ve churned out a piece of writing that you can proudly call yours. Hence, the road to perfection might be long yet absolutely necessary. Now, this is where step 4 comes in. This step requires you to critically analyze your essay and pluck out any details that you might think need refining.

Your first draft is going to be far from perfect, so be mentally prepared for that. Assess it objectively and go through it as if you’re in your teacher’s shoes. After that, compare it with the grading metrics your teacher said she’s been using to check everyone’s essays.

Now, prepare another draft, preferably a few days later, because even you’d be fed up with looking and rectifying the same thing over and over again. Begin writing the other draft with a fresh mind. Mention the points you might’ve missed, make stronger arguments and modify the structure as per need.

Step#5: Editing and Proofreading

With the different stages of writing, it’s possible for you to make silly mistakes while in the zone of making your point regardless of the sentence structuring. Once you’re done with your final draft, keeping in mind, it’ll take you a couple of tries to finalize the deal; you can go over the essay to check for minor issues.

Issues pertaining to spelling errors, grammatical mistakes or the butchered sentence structuring, which you blatantly ignored earlier. Editing and proofreading help in refining your essay and avoiding making any mistakes that might earn you a negative score.

For more consistent work, you may use software like Grammarly to lend you a helping hand from making any messes. These were the five steps of the writing process.

Adapting to a writing process

Different authors opt for different writing processes but the gist remains the same. The idea is to make up your mind surely before writing and then diving head-first into all of it. These processes of writing may get confusing and you might often lose patience adhering to it.

The thing is, you don’t have to strictly abide by a code of conduct; in fact, you have to make up your own writing process, the one which you’re comfortable with, to get the most out of yourself as a writer.

If you still can’t wrap your head around this tactic, perhaps you ought to lookup process writing examples in order to gain a better understanding. Furthermore, you can also go through the writing processes adopted by various renowned authors for inspiration and then draw up a writing process of your own that works for you.

If it takes time to get used to it, don’t worry. All good things take time. Think about it in this way that you’re investing in bettering your future. If not, you can always rely on the best dissertation writing service UK to lessen the headache for you.

We’ve tried our best in imparting the knowledge we possess so that you can make a smooth transition. Sooner or later, you’ll get the hang of it and manage to turn things around for the better. This was our piece of advice for you to adopt a writing process into your daily life for penning your thoughts. It’ll certainly make things easier for you by ridding you of that stress and anxiety and also to perform well in all your write-ups. That’s it from our side. Let us know what else you’d like to learn.