Introduction
Writing is a significant part of our daily lives because of the way we communicate in modern society: through e-mails and text messages. Writing is the most challenging skill to learn, compared to listening, speaking, and reading (Miftah 9). These facts highlight the importance of the writing process, with the help of which one can organize their thoughts and ideas, overcome procrastination and impediments, and increase productivity (“The Writing Process”). While there are several recommended ways one can approach writing, every person is different and may develop their own habits that allow them to be effective. In this paper, I will attempt to describe my writing process.
How I Approach Writing
Before writing my first word or even researching the topic I am trying to write about, I first think about it and write down related words. While some may call it brainstorming, I call it mind-mapping because I do not compose a list of words but instead draw a graph of associations. These associations help me find related concepts and topics that will then allow me to generate ideas on how I am going to structure my paper. This brings me to the next step: making an outline.
Outlines are crucial because they give you a high-level overview and allow you to concentrate on one point at a time, which contributes to productivity. It also helps me be efficient in my research because I know what information I need to start writing. When my outline is ready, I start researching, and the exciting thing is that the outline and research are parts of an iterative process. The outline can shape research, but the same is true for research: it can influence my outline. The iteration continues until I have all the data I require and the outline is satisfying.
At this point, I am ready to start writing, so I begin working on a draft. This stage is free of tension and anxiety because I only write as if I am telling a story to my friend. I do not concentrate on grammar, punctuation, sentence length, and structure. I only ensure that everything I want to say is written down. Such a draft allows me to review my outline, provide high-level structure, and make corrections if needed.
The next step is to write the final version using the draft. I rewrite every sentence so that they are grammatically correct and feature concise and rich vocabulary. Reviewing the sentence structure is also critical, as the poor structure might become a source of ambiguity and unnecessary complexity. The paper must also be checked for plagiarism at this stage, and various tools help me accomplish this task. The outcome of this step is the pre-final paper. The last thing I do is showing my paper to a friend with proper language skills for proofreading. It is one of the essential parts of my writing process, as there could be mistakes I did not notice.
Conclusion
Much knowledge and information are conveyed through books and articles, and without excellent writing skills, this would have been impossible. Writing is also extremely important for developing many human abilities, including attention, concentration, memorization, organization, and methodology. Having a well-established writing process can help people make writing a trivial task and overcome many difficulties associated with academic or business writing.
Works Cited
- Miftah, M. Zaini. “Enhancing Writing Skill Through Writing Process Approach.” Journal on English as a Foreign Language (JEFL), vol.5, no. 10, 2015, pp. 9-24.
- “The Writing Process” Purdue Writing Lab, 2019. Web.