Mastering the Writing Process: Steps to Crafting a Successful Essay (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: If you've ever waited until the night before to write an essay and then scored poorly on it, the writing process is here to save you. First, what is the writing process? As the name suggests, it's a writing process you go through to write an essay to make it more manageable. Instead of a daunting set of mountains that you're not sure how to climb, the writing process is a series of steps you can take to complete your larger project. Good writers spend time thinking, brainstorming, researching, outlining, drafting, conferencing with others, revising, editing, and publishing. Let's go over each step. The first step is a thinking stage. When you get an assignment, spend time thinking about your purpose, experience with, and knowledge of the topic, and think about what questions you have about the topic. To get started, think about what kind of essay you're being asked to write, and ultimately, what are you being tested on? Once you know your purpose in writing the essay, then think about the topic you're focusing on. What do you know about the topic? What experiences have you had that might relate to the topic? What do you want to or need to know, and where will you find this information? After you've thought about your topic, purpose, and experience, start brainstorming. To do this, jot down your answers to your questions or topics you were thinking about. Don't put pressure on yourself to write the perfect sentence because brainstorming is messy and doesn't always need to make sense. You can write in concise bulleted lists or create a web or free write, but the point is to just start writing to explore your ideas. Next, if you need research or you find that a lot of the brainstorming consists of questions you can't yet answer, then start searching for sources and actively reading them to get the information you need for your essay. Be sure to find credible and reliable sources from authors who are experts in their fields. You can do this by using your library's databases or Google Scholar. After you've researched, you can start organizing and outlining your ideas. Look for common threads and create main topics that answer your prompt. Also, add subtopics to the main topics showing the evidence you'll use to support your ideas. Having a clearly organized outline with the evidence you need is a crucial step in the writing process that will make the actual writing of the paper much easier. With a clear outline, you're now ready to draft. When you draft, don't worry about perfection. Instead, write the essay to the best of your ability, knowing that you're giving yourself time to revise. By drafting an essay, you're fleshing out an outline and explaining how the ideas you listed are connected. If you don't have anything to say about certain topics, then drafting makes the potential holes in your essay apparent. This allows you to continue to do more research or go back to your brainstorming to choose other subtopics. Once you have the draft, you can conference with others. This stage of the writing process is very important because you'll get advice on what works well in your essay and what you can do to make your writing better. If your peer editing and your partner mostly focuses on minor issues like spelling or grammar, ask them questions about the higher-order concerns, such as what did you think about my thesis or do my topic sentences reflect the main idea of my paragraphs? If you don't have classmates who could look over your work, see if you can run it by your tutor or instructor. After conferencing, you can work on revising your essay. Don't confuse revising with editing. Revision requires you to rethink the major aspects of your essay, like your organization, use of evidence, or thesis statement. Focus on these global concerns and address what needs improvement. When the hard work of revising is done, you can move on to editing, which focuses on lower-order concerns like grammar or spelling. One strategy is to read your work aloud to see if you stumble across any of these minor issues. The very last stage of the writing process is publishing. How will you turn in your essay? Do you need to print out a hard copy or submit it online? What about the formatting? Are you required to use APA or MLA formatting? Pay attention to the final touches to ensure you're meeting the requirements and properly turning in your work. The writing process takes time, but makes the act of writing the essay less stressful. The amount of time you spend on each part will vary depending on the length and complexity of your project. You know your limitations, so give yourself plenty of time to complete each part. It looks like Sarah put in the hard work and followed the writing process. If you found this information helpful, please like and subscribe for more content.