Writing Process
There are many ways to write a good essay, paper, or article. Writing is suggestive, meaning it can be interpreted in many ways, and the way that I am about to teach you is not the only way to writing, nor is it the best way to right; however, it still is an effective way to right a good essay. To learn how to write a good essay one must first learn the steps: first, one must have a pretty good idea of what one is about to write about; second, one should free-write on paper; next, one should research the topic thoroughly; afterwards, one should write a first draft; then, the writer must revise and search for addition information, then revise and double check again, finally one should edit the remaining portions of the essay. Consequently, writing an essay is really quite simple; however, will take a lot of time and steps. First, one must have a pretty good idea about what one must write before actually writing.
Knowing what to write is always a good thing to do, it’s sort of like the planning ahead and packing part of writing a good essay. If those students who are having trouble with their writing can’t think of a good topic two good things to do are: first, free-write about whatever is in their mind for about ten or twenty minutes, and after the free-write is finished one must look through the free-write on a topic that one is interested in or think one can write on essay on; the second thing to do is to brainstorm, this is where one lists all the topics one can think of on a piece of paper, next, go and give supporting details to each item on the paper and the item with the most supporting or strongest supporting details should be the topic of ones essay. Second, one must just free-write on a piece of paper about their idea to see what they know about the subject. The point of this stage of the writing process is to “vomit” all the information one knows about ones subject unto the page. There are always two good reasons to do this.
The first reason is that if one “vomits” onto ones page during free-writing one might find “gems” in ones writing. For example, when one is free-writing one almost always writes something they would usually do not think of, this is good once one have that view of the subject you can expand on the idea making an extraordinary first draft. The other reason to write the free-write is to see what one still needs to research in the research portion of the writing process. For example, if I was writing a free-write about free ranch chickens and I found I didn’t know if free ranch chicken guano was a more effective as a fertilizer than regular chicken guano I would research it, adding to the complexity of my essay. Next, one must research their subject thoroughly. Like I said before, researching is a way to expand the depth of your essay.
There are three reasons to research for ones essay. The first reason is so that ones essay has more depth. This is important because it makes you seem smarter and more intelligence, making one get better grades or more intellectual people interested. Another reason is to length ones essay. This is very important if you have a page requirement and you don’t quite make it.
Another reason researching is good is so that one can fill the gaps to help connect their essay better. For example if you wanted to connect if free ranch chickens are better than regular chickens and chicken guano, you might have to research if free ranch chicken is a better fertilizer than regular chicken guano. After researching and whatnot, you should write your first draft. There are many names for this draft, the “child’s draft”, the “zero draft”, the “s****y draft”, etc. However, all the names somewhat refer to the same thing. During the first draft stage, it doesn’t really matter what one writes, just clump all the information one might have obtained onto the page and there’s ones first draft.
It doesn’t matter if ones grammar is really bad or if ones overall first draft is bad, because it’s the first draft and it can still be made at least ten times better through revision and such. A reason not to skip this part of the writing process is because although most experienced writers consider the first draft, the zero it is still very important, because it’s better to have a zero than to have a negative number. I mean you might as well start rather than just sitting there having nothing to do. Then, after one is done writing their first draft, they must begin to revise. Revising is a big part in the writing section and ideally the longest part of the writing process as well as the most important.
Revising is the most important part of the writing process because it helps work out kinks in ones system, without revision, one could never write a book people will like. For example, when I write I never pay attention to want I write I just play attention to how long I need to write, also I type down whatever ideas first come to mind. This process usually gives me a lot of information however, many of the ideas I have are still very confusing and need to be clarified, and something I’ll be righting something and then in a moments notice will change the subject; however, after I print out my paper and run through it with a pen it is surprising how many red marks will be on the paper by the end of the revising session. Even when taking a break, or doing other stuff one should constantly be thinking of ideas to help revise ones paper, because ones writing can always be improved, no matter how many times it’s revised. The next step is closely associated with this step. It is to revise again and again and again and double check.
This step if mostly for one to add and input any changes that might be needed to make the essay closer to perfect. Finally the last step is to edit ones essay, the point of this part of the writing process is to attempt to get rid of all grammatical errors. Although, this part isn’t as important as some of the other steps, it still has its purposes. Two reasons to not forget this part of the writing process are because if you have proper grammar you will get approval of sticklers and you will get a better grade in the grammar section. The other reason to not skip the grammar section of the writing process is because sometimes a comma or a punctuation mark will change the meaning completely.
For example, there is “a joke” in grammar that our teacher told us : “A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. ‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. ‘Well, I’m a panda’, he says, at the door.
‘Look it up.’ The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. ‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” The joke is that since the manual is poorly punctuated the panda interprets the line as it eats then it shoots and leaves.
If there was no comma in between the eats and shoots the sentence would have meant the panda eats the vegetables shoots and leaves. In conclusion, there are many ways to write a good essay and the writing process I explained above is only one of the many ways to do so. And for my writing process although some parts are not as important as others, it’s crucial that you use all the steps, because if you don’t do one part another part might not be able to be done. For example, if one decides not to do the first draft one will not be able to revise, etc. I hope that this essay helped those students that had trouble with writing.
