8 The Writing Process
Writing an academic paper is a process, meaning that it unfolds over time with opportunities for reflections and revision. Many of us think of writing a paper as something that happens in one sitting, but this approach is sub-optimal for several reasons. First, writing a paper in one sitting removes the possibility of revision, and none of us write perfect papers for our first drafts. Reading over one’s writing, giving oneself some space from it, allows the writer to see it more objectively and increases the odds of us catching errors of all kinds. Second, the writing process takes a good amount of time, and when you try to cram the whole process into one sitting, you end up intimidating yourself. Namely, you think to yourself, “wow, I’m going to be up all night writing this thing”, and as a result, you are more likely to procrastinate because nobody wants to sit down and write a paper for seven hours. If you learn to spread the work out over a period of time, you will not only find it easier to handle overall, but you will also give yourself those crucial opportunities to improve your drafts.
The writing process is not linear, but recursive. What this means is that, while certain stages of the process usually come before others, you can revisit any stage at any time, as many times as is necessary. In other words, once you have finished pre-writing and have started your first draft, it’s never too late to “go back to the drawing board” and try some different pre-writing exercises later, especially if you find yourself stuck while drafting. The key is not to feel pinned down to the order of the stages. The following are all pieces of the writing process.
Research
When you begin writing a paper, you might already have several ideas in mind for how you would like to approach the topic, what major points you would like to address, and if it is argumentative, you might already have your position figured out. However, a synthesis essay is fundamentally build around the synthesis of information from different sources. In other words, your goal is to gather information from different places and bring it all together, or synthesize it, into your own essay. Organization is key to writing a coherent, comprehensible paper that is both sensible and easy to read.
It is usually a good idea to try and start here in the process. Read through different sources, being sure to take notes as you do so that you are bale to remind yourself which sources were the most relevant and which ones had specific points you would like to mention in your own paper. It is also helpful to note interesting phrases, statistics, and other things that you find while researching, so that when it’s finally time to start drafting, you can easily find those quotes again and insert them where appropriate. If there are abstracts, or summaries, available for different sources, it’s often helpful to read those first because they will inform you of all the key topics in a particular source; this way, you don’t spend too much time delving into a source that will ultimately not be relevant to your own paper.
Pre-writing
Pre-writing can take many forms; some you will be familiar with while others might be totally new to you. It is extremely helpful to experiment and try out as many different exercises as you can so that you can find out which ones work best for you. Keep in mind that some exercises might be more effective for one essay but less so for another. Try to remain flexible and keep an open mind. Here are some examples of types of pre-writing: free-writing, writing down whatever comes to mind; clustering (webbing), use the major topic/idea as the center and create branches for sub-topics; listing, use a specific goal as the guide for what you know or want to know and make a list; and outlining, create an organizational map for your essay.
Drafting
Drafting is when you finally start writing the paper in earnest, and in the stage it is curcial to allow yourself to simply write without worrying too much about grammar, syntax and paragraph size, Those elements can be examined and fixed in the revision stage, so at this point you should simply let your ideas flow. As long as you have given yourself ample time to revise later on, you can feel free to write unencumbered by worries or self-doubt. Remember that even the drafting process is recursive, so if it helps you start writing in the middle of the paper rather than at the beginning, then do that. A lot of students get intimidated by the blank page and the pressure of writing the first sentence of their introduction, so feel free to skip it and come back to the introduction once you have more of the draft fleshed out.
Revising
Revision is absolutely essential to any writing assignment, but if you wait until the last minute or otherwise try to do everything all at once, you simply won’t have the time or the distance from your paper to adequately revise it. Revision is a “big picture” review of your essay. You should focus on eamining the content to ensure that all information included in an essay is connected, either to the thesis or the topic sentences. You should also check that your reasons and evidence are audience-based. Revision ensures that your writing will reach your audience.
Editing
When you edit, you are looking for grammatical errors, and you are also making sure that the sentences in each paragraph relate directly to that particular paragraph’s topic sentence. There are many useful techniques for proofreading, such as reading the paper out loud, having someone else read it out loud to you, and even reading the paper starting from the last sentence and moving backwards. Reading from the end of the paper helps you to focus on sentence-level errors instead of large-scale organization.
Finally. . .
Try to always give yourself lots of time to work on your writing assignments, and spread the different tasks out over a few days, if not weeks (if you have that much time before the assignment is due). It may seem like this is more burdensome than sitting down to write it all in one evening, but you will end up spending almost the same amount of total time, but in the end you will absolutely write a better paper if you spread the work out.
