THE PROCESS OF WRITING

Any writing does not come to become a masterpiece as soon as you write it. A “Writing” goes through its various stages to become perfection in the eyes of the writer before he/she thinks it good enough for a reader.

Steps in Writing

Formulating your Rough Copy
Writing is a process that is recursive which means as you are writing you have to develop and expand your ideas. Roughly it can be divided into four stages
• Planning
• Drafting
• Revising
• Editing

Planning: Before you begin to write anything you need a topic on which to write. You would then go about a plan on what to include in your writing. What would be the headings, the sub headings and the text. You could approach this process like you do for any other plan, by getting ideas from other sources, writing notes, outlining the document you are to prepare and putting in the notes and material you got from sources into the outline.

Drafting: It is the text that matter the most after the heading and the subheadings. You need to be put the material you collected into a proper sequence of paragraphs.
• Here you explain your ideas, connect ideas to form a flow and support the ideas fully.
• This draft is what you know about the topic you are writing and so do not be bothered about spellings and other details. Just concentrate on the flow.

Revising: Now that your draft is ready. It is time to revise the written document. You need to look at your document from a reader’s point of view.
• Are the written ideas supported enough and are they convincing enough. If they convince a skeptical you then they are sure to convince others as well.
• Is your reader a person who does not know some technical parlance? Then it needs to be explained a little bit more in your writing.
• Is your writing properly organized into paragraphs? You need to view your writing in this perspective and ask if the reader needs to know something before he proceeds to read the next paragraph.
• Now look at your writing and refine your prose by making each sentence concise and simple.
• Make the connections between different ideas explicit and clear.

Editing: Do not edit your writing till you finish all the above steps.
• When editing you need to check for grammar, mechanics, and spelling.
• The last thing before printing your document is to run your spell check software.

Hope these tips kick start your writing.