THE PROCESS OF WRITING

Writing, like speaking, is a productive skill. But while it is productive, it is different from speaking because a writer is able to think more carefully before communicating. A writer also has the advantage of changing what he or she has written. Because of this, the process of writing is different from the skill of speaking. Let us begin with a brief introduction to the writing process. Some teachers and students have the idea that writing is a simple exercise that looks something like this:
Teacher gives a topic
Students writes a composition
Students turns in the composition
Teacher grades and returns the composition
But actually, language teaching methodologists have discovered that good writers use a much more complex process. This process can be summarized as follows:
Prewriting:
In this stage of the process, writers think of many ideas. First, they think about the topic they might write about. Then they form ideas related to the topic. Finally they begin organizing those ideas. All of this happens before they begin writing a draft of their composition.
Pre-writing activities:
- Listing: This is brainstorming a list of ideas for a composition. It may be a list of general topics to write about or it may be specific ideas and details for a given topic.
- Free writing: Simply begin writing words and sentences that come to mind without paying attention to organization, spelling, or grammar. If you have already chosen a topic, free write about the topic. If you do not have a topic yet, just write whatever ideas come to your mind.
- Looping: Looping is a special kind of freewriting. First, the students freewrite a short paragraph. Then they read what they just wrote, and underline one important idea. They write a new paragraph about the idea underlined. After writing a second paragraph, students read it and underline the most important word in that paragraph, and use it as the topic of a third paragraph. The purpose of looping is to start with a general idea and make it more specific.
- Clustering: Clustering is useful after students have chosen a topic. The purpose of clustering is to think of details to write in their compositions. They write the topic, such as “my favorite teacher” in the middle of a blank piece of paper, and draw a circle around. Then around the circle they draw lines, and at the end of each line they write a detail about the teacher, such as appearance, personality, style, and memories about the teacher. Then they circle each of these details and draw lines to specific points about them.























Writing:
The next stage in the process involves taking the idea from prewriting and putting them into a roughly written composition. This is not a perfect copy of the composition; it is only an attempt to begin the essay. Writers often begin the writing stage without knowing exactly what they want to say. But as they write, they get new ideas and it becomes dearer to them what they want to communicate. They cannot see the final product from the beginning. Instead, writers develop their thoughts as they write. Before, many thought that the writing process ended with a written draft. But actually, a very important stage follows the writing step: Revising.
Revising:
The last stage of writing may greatly change the composition. In revising, writers must remember that a piece of writing can always be improved and they should be willing to add, remove or change text they have already written. Part of revising is editing the composition by rearranging paragraphs and sentences, improving the choice of words, grammar, and structure. Sometimes, the writer may realize later in the process that he or she did not include all the important ideas during the prewriting stage. Because of this, even during the revising stage, writers may go back and do a little more prewriting. The final part of this stage of the process is proofreading for any mistakes.

As one can see from this description, the writing process is more complex than just writing a composition once and trying to correct the errors. Teachers can help their students became good writers by teaching them the process of writing.
The writing process gives the teacher many opportunities for interacting with the students while they are writing a single composition. A paper may be written two, three ore more times. And each time the teacher or fellow classmates may help the writer improve the writing.