The Writing Process

Most importantly, find a method that works best for your learning style. Here are some suggests for different stages of writing:

1. Pre-Writing: Discover valuable ideas by opening your mind to ALL ideas. Ask thought-provoking questions about your topic.
2. Thesis Statement: As the main idea of your entire essay, this statement should be truthful and persuasive.
3. Organization / Outline: Arrange your stages and details into the beginning, middle, and end of the paper.
4. Rough Draft: Focus on content, organization, and style. As you write, ask yourself, "who is my audience, and how should I write for them?"
5. Revising: Fix Logical mistakes, missing steps, clumsy transitions, confusing organization before fixing grammar and formatting. Use this guide.
6. Proofreading: Using a list of your common mistakes, read the paper BACKWARDS one sentence at a time and LOOK FOR ONE ERROR AT A TIME. Then read the paper OUT LOUD while following the text with your pen. Use this guide.
7. MLA Formatting: Now make your essay PERFECT. Make sure the essay is formatted correctly and meets the MLA style requirements.

All of the steps are important, but you do not HAVE to do them in this order. In fact, you might go back to certain steps several times. You can write your rough draft and then reverse outline, for instance. Or what if you have writer's block? Most important is making sure that you include all the parts of an essay in your final draft.

A note on timed writing: You will follow an abbreviated version of this process for the Final Exam Essay Option, but you should not re-copy a rough draft when writing under time restraints. Instead, you should (a) skip lines as you go and (b) start each new paragraph at the top of a new sheet of paper. Both methods leave room for corrections. If you make a mistake, cross it out with a single line and write the correction above it. If you want to add sentences, use labels like a star or triangle to indicate where an insertion should go. THERE IS NO NEED to recopy an in-class composition simply to make it look neat. Your grade will not be higher simply because your essay looks good.