Com Week 2 The Writing Process

Com Week 2 The Writing Process

I am a teaching assistant for a high school English class. Here is my brochure on how fellow students can succeed if they read and apply the following:

Let's look at how three students have described the steps that they typically follow when writing a paper:
  * Before doing anything, I make sure I've got a quiet room and a clear head. When I feel ready to work, I sit in front of my laptop and begin tapping out whatever comes to mind. Then, after taking a short walk, I read over what I've written and pick out the things that strike me as worth keeping--key ideas and interesting details. After this, I usually go on to compose a rough draft pretty quickly. Then (maybe in a day or two, if I've gotten an early start) I read the draft and add explanations and ideas and make some grammatical changes. Then I write it over again, making more changes as I go. Sometimes I complete the whole process in an hour or two. Sometimes it takes a week or more.

  * I like to do my first draft on paper--that is, after I've daydreamed for an hour or two, raided the refrigerator, and made a fresh pot of coffee. I specialize in procrastination. After running out of ways to distract myself, I start to scribble down everything I can think of. And I mean scribble--write fast, make a mess. When I figure out what I've scrawled, I try to fix it up into an orderly, halfway-decent essay. Then I put it aside (after making another trip to the refrigerator) and start all over again. When I'm done, I compare both papers and combine them by taking some things out and putting other things in. Then I read my draft out loud. If it sounds okay, I go to the computer and type it up.

  * In trying to put together a paper, I go through four phases. First, there's the idea phase, where I get this bright idea. Then there is the productive phase, where I'm really smoking, and I start thinking about the Pulitzer Prize. After that, of course, comes the block phase, and all those prize-winning dreams...