Five important steps of the writing process

Every student needs to be successful when tackling the writing process. Writing everything from simple essays through to a PhD dissertation uses the same basic principles, the same basic steps. The sooner you learn the steps and have them ingrained into your subconscious, the easier your writing becomes, not to mention you getting higher scores. Here are the five important steps of the writing process.

• planning
• first draft
• repairing
• correcting
• feedback

Planning is an essential part of the writing process. So many students simply dive into the topic and start writing. This is where they make some serious mistakes. Lack of planning means they don't discover all the relevant research. Lack of planning means they don't get all the relevant ideas. And these two missing aspects of the writing process will seriously limit your effectiveness.

But if you do the correct amount of planning it is so much easier to go to the second step which is writing the first draft. Here you do not hold back. Here you write hell for leather. The idea is not to think about what you are writing but simply to write as quickly as possible using the information as developed in your plan. Yes, you will overwrite but this is not a problem. What is a problem is if you underwrite.

Then we come to the third step which is repairing what you've done in your quickly written first draft. It's not so much that you look for spelling and grammar errors, although they are important, but rather that you look for continuity, repetition and unclear writing. If you can make sure that the continuity of your writing flows, that you remove the repetition and you undo the unclear writing, then you are building an excellent piece of prose.

Now you come to the fine art of discovering mistakes. This is the proofreading of your writing. If you find them, remove the repetition and the ambiguous writing. And you need to make sure that the structure is correct, that the spelling and grammar are correct and that everything is as it should be.

And finally you come to getting a response from an appropriate person or persons before you finally hand in your piece of writing. This could be a fellow student, a friend or a member of your family. You want an independent response. Obviously if what they say is something important, you would take the time to check out the comments and be sure that you address any problem you may have missed.