6 STEPS OF THE
WRITING PROCESS
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STEP 1 – PREWRITING
Pre-writing literally means, “before writing.”
Before you actually begin writing your essay,
you will need to do the following things:
1. Choose a topic to write on
2. Brainstorm or generate ideas for your topic
3. Focus in on central ideas
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STEP 2 – PLAN AND ORGANIZE
Organizing your list of ideas can help you specifically
decide what you want to write about and how to go
about writing. This is a rough plan for your essay
and can help make the rough draft writing easier.
There are three main ways to ‘plan and organize’ your
ideas:
1. Spider Diagram/Bubble Cluster
2. Outline
3. Columns
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STEP 3 – ROUGH DRAFT WRITING
After getting ideas and organizing them, it is time to
start writing the essay. When you begin writing your
rough draft, try to remember the following:
1. Don’t worry about writing the ‘perfect’ paper
the first time.
2. Don’t focus on spelling and grammar as you
write your rough draft. You can check this later
in the writing process.
3. Your goal in writing a rough draft is to develop
and support the ideas listed in your outline.
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STEP 4 - EDIT
Editing is what you’re used to looking for naturally
when you read your paper or peer edit someone else’s.
When you read through your paper the first time after
writing it, you should EDIT ONLY!
Begin editing your draft for
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
spelling,
grammar,
capitalization,
punctuation,
word choice, and
sentence structure errors.
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STEP 5 - REVISE
After you write your first draft, go back over it and
look for ways to improve your essay in content and
organization.
Read through your paper a second time
and REVISE ONLY!
Begin revising your draft for
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
idea development
organization of sentences in a paragraph,
organization of paragraphs in the essay,
repetition of ideas, and
changing introduction and/or conclusion.
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STEP 6 - PUBLISH
The last step is turning in your essay to be graded.
Look at the guidelines below for turning in the final
draft of your essay.
1. Did you follow the directions on the project handout?
a.
b.
c.
d.
Times New Roman
Size 12
Correct format (name, hour…)
Unique title
e. Double Spaced, One-inch margins
f. 5 Above Average Paragraphs
g. Flesch-Kincaid (pre and post)
2. Is your paper error free, having been edited and revised
several times over?
3. Is your final copy clean, not written on, stapled neatly, etc.?
4. Are you turning it in on time?
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