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Chapter 1

The Writing Process

The essays in this book will help you understand the elements of good writing and provide ample opportunity for you to practice writing in response to the model essays. As you write your essays, pay attention to your writing process. This chapter focuses on the stages of the writing process — prewriting, writing the first draft, revising, editing, and proofreading. It concludes with a sample of one student’s writing process that you can model your own writing after. The strategies suggested in this chapter for each stage of the writing process will help you overcome many of the challenges you may face while writing essays.

Writers rarely rely on inspiration alone to produce an effective piece of writing. Good writers prewrite or plan, write the first draft, revise, edit, and proofread. It is worth remembering, however, that often the process is recursive, moving back and forth among the five stages. Moreover, writing is personal; no two people go about it exactly the same way. Still, it is possible to learn the steps in the process and thereby have a reliable method for undertaking a writing task.

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Prewriting Reading can give you ideas and information, and reading helps expand your knowledge of the organizational patterns available to you; consequently, it can help direct all your prewriting activities. During prewriting, you select your subject and topic, gather ideas and information, and determine the thesis and organizational pattern or patterns you will use. Once you have worked through the prewriting process, you will be ready to start on your first draft. Let’s explore how this works.

Understand Your Assignment

When you first receive an assignment, read it over several times to make sure you understand what you are being asked to do. Try restating the assignment in your own words to make sure you understand it. For example, consider the following assignments:

1. Narrate an experience that taught you that every situation has at least two sides.

2. Explain what is meant by theoretical modeling in the social sciences.

3. Write a persuasive essay in which you support or refute the following proposition: “Violence in the media is in large part responsible for an increase in violence in American society today.”

Each of these assignments asks you to write in different ways:

1. The first assignment asks you to tell the story of an event that showed you that every situation has more than one perspective. To complete the assignment, you might choose simply to narrate the event, or you might choose to analyze it in depth. In either case, you will need to explain to your reader how you came to this new understanding of multiple perspectives and why it was important to you.

2. The second assignment asks you to explain what theoretical modeling is and why it is used. To accomplish this assignment, you will first need to read about the concept to gain a thorough understanding of it, and then you’ll need to define it in your own words and explain its purpose and usefulness to your readers. You will also want to demonstrate the abstract concept with concrete examples to help your readers understand it.

3. The third assignment asks you to take a position on a controversial issue for which there are many studies on both sides of the question. You will need to research the studies,

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consider the evidence they present, and then take a stand of your own. Your argument will necessarily have to draw on the sources and evidence you have researched, and you will need to refute the arguments and evidence presented by those experts who take an opposing position.

If, after reading the assignment several times, you are still unsure about what is being asked of you or about any additional requirements of the assignment, such as length or format, be sure to consult with your instructor.

Choose a Subject Area and Focus on a Topic

Although you will usually be given specific assignments in your writing course, you may sometimes have the freedom to write on any subject that interests you. In such a case, you may already have a specific idea in mind. For example, if you are interested in sports, you might argue against the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes. What happens, however, when you are free to choose your own subject and cannot think of anything to write about? If you find yourself in this situation, begin by determining a broad subject that you might enjoy writing about — a general subject such as medical ethics, amateur sports, or foreign travel. Also consider what you’ve recently read — essays in Models for Writers, for example — or your career ambitions when choosing a subject. Select several likely subjects and let your mind explore their potential for interesting topics. Your goal is to arrive at an appropriately narrowed topic.

A topic is the specific part of a subject on which a writer focuses. Subjects such as the environment, literature, and sports are too broad to be dealt with adequately in a single essay. Entire books are written about these and other subjects. Start with your broad subject and make it more specific.

Suppose, for example, you select farming and advertising as possible subject areas. The examples in the Narrowing Subjects to Topics box that follows illustrate how to narrow these broad subjects into manageable topics. Notice how each successive topic is more narrowed than the one before it. Moving from the general to the specific, the topics become appropriate for essay-length writing.

In moving from a broad subject to a particular topic, you should take into account any assigned constraints on length or format. You will also want to consider the amount of time you have to write. These practical considerations will affect the scope of your topic.

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For more practice, visit the LaunchPad for Models for Writers: LearningCurve > Main Ideas

Get Ideas and Collect Information

After you have found your topic, you will need to determine what you want to say about it. The best way to do this is to gather information. Your ideas about a topic must be supported by information, such as facts and examples. The information you gather about a topic will influence your ideas about the topic and what you want to say. Here are some of the ways you can gather information:

1. Brainstorm. Jot down the things you know about a topic, freely associating ideas and information as a way to explore the topic and its possibilities. (See p. 30 for an example.) Try not to censor or edit your notes, and don’t worry about spelling or punctuation. Don’t write your notes in list form because such an organization will imply a hierarchy of ideas, which may hamper your creativity and the free flow of your thoughts. The objective of brainstorming is to free up your thinking before you start to write. You may

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http://www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/models13e
want to set aside your notes and return to them over several days. Once you generate a substantial amount of brainstormed material, you will want to study the items, attempt to see relationships among them, or sort and group the entries by using different colored highlighters.

2. Cluster. Another strategy for stimulating your thinking about a topic is clustering. Place your topic in a circle and draw lines from that circle to other circles in which you write related key words or phrases. Around each of these key words, generate more circles representing the various aspects of the key word that come to mind. (See p. 31 for an example.) The value of clustering over brainstorming is that you are generating ideas and organizing them at the same time. Both techniques work very well, but you may prefer one over the other or find that one works better with one topic than another.

3. Research. You may want to add to what you already know about your topic with research. Research can take many forms beyond formal research carried out in your library. For example, firsthand observations and interviews with people knowledgeable about your topic can provide up-to-date information. Whatever your form of research, take careful notes so you can accurately paraphrase an author or quote an interviewee. Chapters 10 and 23 (see pp. 225–42 and 595–605) will help with all aspects of researching a topic.

Understand What a Thesis Is

Once you have generated ideas and information about your topic, you are ready to begin the important task of establishing a controlling idea, or thesis, for your essay. The thesis of an essay is its main idea, the point you are trying to make. It is important because everything in your essay, all the ideas and information you have gathered, should be connected to the thesis. It is the glue that holds your writing together.

In his essay “The Ways of Meeting Oppression” (pp. 425–29), Martin Luther King Jr. offers the following thesis statement: “Oppressed people deal with their oppression in three characteristic ways.” King supports his thesis by describing the three ways that oppressed people have traditionally dealt with oppression and explaining why two of those responses — acquiescing to their oppressors or violently resisting them — have not traditionally worked and are not responses he would recommend. He then works his way to the conclusion of his essay, recommending the path of nonviolent resistance as the best way to achieve social justice. His thesis statement carries with it the answer to several implied or built-in questions: What are the characteristic ways of meeting oppression, and which one is to be

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recommended? The structure of his essay, then, is also built into his thesis statement. Remember that a weak thesis cannot produce a successful essay no matter how much

effort you put into your writing. A strong thesis, on the other hand, will succeed, but only if it is properly supported.

Develop Your Thesis

You might think that creating a thesis requires some kind of clever thinking or special skills on your part when, in fact, it’s a fairly straightforward task. Rather than staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper hoping for a thesis to magically appear, you need to look at the ideas and information you have generated about your topic and ask questions about them in order to understand the topic completely.