The Inescapable Writing Process or Preaching (Teaching) What I Don't Practice

I am a terrible writer. More precisely, I am a terrible composer of essays. When I begin, I barely have a plan and I rarely have a clear goal. At best I’ll have instructions and a primary text that I want (or have) to say something about.

My “prewriting” consists of staring at the prompt. I can’t do a working thesis because I don’t know what I want to say. I can’t do an outline because I don’t know what I’m going to say, let alone how I want to say it. I can’t even do a word map or a cluster or bubbles or whatever those things are because I don’t have a topic.

All I can do is write. So I write. And write. Eventually a topic emerges, I mold it into an argument, and several cuts and pastes later I end up with a decent paper. Sometimes I’m even on time.

Do I have a strategy? It would seem not. Do I follow a process? It doesn’t appear so. But as a student of reading and writing, I know and recognize that writing is a process that can and, for teaching’s sake, should be broken down into three main components: Prewriting, writing (or drafting), and rewriting (or revision).

Just because I, as writer, don’t have a developed prewriting strategy or consciously work through a writing process, it doesn’t mean that a writing process doesn’t exist. Looking at my writing habits, it is clear that I practice all three components of the writing process, even if I don’t mean to, am not aware of it, and am not very good at it.

I mostly write by hand to begin a project. Writing by hand is a form of prewriting because I know I will have to go over those words again when I type them on the computer. This allows me to write a little more freely because I know I can always fix a badly-worded phrase at a later time. I can also make marks on the page to indicate where I might need a quote or if I need to research a point.

At the same time, typing handwritten drafts is a kind of rewriting, as one “corrects” or formalizes one’s words as they go from page to screen. One can also double check facts or rearrange the structure. Many times a passage that I thought was going to be my introduction, ends up being my conclusion

So when I am writing by hand, I am prewriting and writing. When I am typing, I am writing and rewriting. If I were a better student, or at least a little smarter, I would prewrite first, then write, then rewrite.

As graduate students we assume, and it is assumed, that we have our writing strategy well in hand. What we do is what works best for us. For most of us that is probably true. We’ve honed our skills, we’ve practiced our techniques, and we’ve conquered our fears and bad habits.

But for some, myself included, we still really don’t know what we’re doing or how we’re doing it. We get by on a combination of ability, desperation, and caffeine.

Being aware that writing is a process will first make us better students of writing, even if it doesn’t make us better or more disciplined writers. Second, that awareness will make us better teachers of writing.

We do not have to tell students, “you should develop a process of writing.” Rather, we can tell students, “there is a writing process, and within that process there are techniques and strategies that you can follow to not only improve your writing, but to also decrease your stress.”