Essay: The Writing Process

How does one write? How does one write a whole essay, or a book, or anything, for that matter? There is a type of process to write anything. What is this process? What are the steps to help you get through this process? I have always struggled with writing essays and they’ve never come easily to me. I used to sit in my room, in the middle of the night, just staring at a screen, for what would feel like hours. Wondering, “When am I going to finish this paper, or even, start it?” The writing process is lengthy and has many steps, such as reading, brainstorming, creating an outline and a rough draft, editing, and finally having a final draft. These steps can help anyone write a decent and fully developed paper. Learning more about the writing process, and the steps that come with it has helped me immensely over the past few weeks. You can’t just jump into an essay and not think about what you are going to write first and if you do, that probably shouldn’t be your final draft. I love free-writing and I think it’s a great way to start any type of rough draft. As much as you don’t want to just jump into an essay you also don’t want to race to the conclusion. I have always done that, and there are some things about my, and probably many other’s, writing process that needs altering or shifting for the better. When I start my writing process I prefer the reading process to spend most of my time on. This step is crucial to obtaining critical information, whether it is taking notes from a book, researching, or re-reading to make sure I fully comprehend the topic I am explaining.If you do not get all the information you can from your article or book you already are setting yourself up to fail. For example, for this essay I read the two excerpts “Freewriting” by Peter Elbow and “The Marker’s Eye” by Donald Murray. While reading “Freewriting”, it helped me gain knowledge about how to help my writing flow which will help me a lot in the later steps. Taking the time to understand that excerpt will make the rest easier. During the reading of “The Marker’s Eye” I took a lot of notes and highlighted many passages because there was a lot of information to help me in my editing phase of the paper. This is why the reading process is so important to me. The more time I take understanding what I am reading the more information I will be able to use when starting the brainstorming step. Brainstorming is another crucial step in the writing process. This is the layout for your essay. The more thought you put into the structure of your brainstorm the easier it will be to create your essay. This is also the part where you expand on your idea’s and see how much information you can get out of each of your topics. When I am brainstorming sometimes I have ideas that I have to take out because there are not as many supporting facts as I thought there would …show more content…
I try to check my thesis statement every couple of paragraphs to make sure it still embodies the message I am conveying in my essay. This is one of the places in the essay where I really try to grab the reader’s attention. The thesis helps me get an idea for the layout of my essay, an outline so to speak. Personally, I don’t typically give too much attention to an outline. Although, I do believe it is a significant part of the writing process. This step is one that I am trying to give more attention to. Murray’s “The Marker’s Eye” in particular didn’t speak about outlines, more about rough drafts, but I believe the two are very similar. The outline is basically a pre-rough draft and after reading this prompt it made me realize how every draft, no matter how it’s written is a key part to any writing process. For example Murray writes about how important drafts are and how “the first draft, and all of those which follow, are opportunities to discover what [you] have to say and how best [you] can say it.” (109). Clearly, a rough draft is the main step in the process of