WRITING SKILLS

IDENTIFY ONE OF THE MODELS OF THE PROCESS APPROACH TO WRITING AND EXPLAIN HOW YOU WILL USE IT TO DEVELOP YOUR ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL WRITING SKILLS.

Writing is a process, a group of related activities that you can use in any order or way that is helpful. Good writing doesn’t just happen. “I often use writing to contact my emotions” by Mousumi Behari, student, Aurora Colorado. It comes from following stages in a process and these stages are all linked to thinking. All these stages make up one model of which is recursive in nature. In the book, ELEMENTS OF WRITING authored by James L. Kinneavy and John E. Warriner identifies some stages of the process writing model. The process approach emphasizes on the recursive steps that lead to the final product.
The first stage of a model is pre-writing. There is an undeniable fact that, writing begins with looking for something to write about. One may ask “how do writers find ideas?”Often, an experience or a personal interest sparks an idea. In pre-writing you put down your ideas through some techniques. Which are the writer’s journal, free writing brainstorming, clustering, asking questions, reading and listening with focus, imagining, arranging ideas and the like. Pre-writing is a time to experiment, so your imaginations roam as far and wide as it will go.
Secondly, the first draft serves as the next stage of writing, after identifying a topic, purpose, audience and by organizing your information using pre-writing, it is now time to start writing. Some people write their first drafts quickly, just trying to get their ideas on paper. Pre-writing can also serves as a guide to writing your first draft. Start by writing freely, focusing on expressing your ideas clearly. As you write, new ideas come to mind; include the ideas in your draft. Don’t worry about spelling and grammar errors, you can correct them later.
Evaluating is the next stage of the writing approach as discussed in the book “ELEMENTS OF WRITING”. Evaluating is deciding on the strengths and weakness of your paper. You evaluate writing all the time, whether you think or not. There are two ways of evaluating your draft and these are self evaluation and peer evaluation. Self evaluation involves the individual alone and since you are so close to your own writing, evaluating it is harder than judging someone else’s work. But you could read carefully, by reading it more than once. You could also listen carefully, by reading aloud to yourself. Taking time by setting your draft aside, coming back to it later and reading through it would also aid in the self evaluation. Peer evaluation involves other parties such as your friends who would evaluate your writing. Most writers, even people who make a living by writing, have someone else read and evaluate their work. You can get advice from others by sharing your writing. Moreover, revising serves as one of the most important stage of this model. It is making the necessity to improve your paper. When you revise you make handwritten corrections on your paper, you then write or type a new copy. In revising you add new information, words, sentences, and sometimes a whole paragraph. You sometimes have to take out repeated or unnecessary information and unrelated ideas. Replacement is also use in revising to take out weak or awkward wording of details. In revising, you can reorder to move information, sentences and paragraphs for logical order.
The next stage on this model is proofreading. In proofreading, you carefully reread your paper. You correct your mistakes in grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation. In proofreading you focus on one line at a time and read slowly one word at a time. If you are not sure, what is correct, look it up. When proofreading, you could ask yourself the following questions. Is every sentence a complete sentence, not a fragment? Does every sentence begin with a capital letter and end with the correct punctuation mark? Do plural verbs have plural subjects? Do singular verbs have singular subjects? Are verbs in the right form? Are verbs in the right tense? Are adjectives and adverb forms used correctly in making comparisons? Does every pronoun agree with its antecedent (the word it refers to) in number and in gender? Are pronoun references clear? Are all words spelled correctly? Are the plural forms of nouns correct? All these questions would help you to have a good proofreading.
The final stage of this model as discussed by James L. Kinneavy and John E. Warriner in their book ELEMENTS OF WRITING is publishing. After working so hard through the earlier stages of the model, it is now time to publish or share your writing with others. Your finished product should be written in blue or black ink, type or you use a word processor.

In conclusion, using this model will help me in person to be very creative, imaginary, and critical and the like, when it comes to writing. It is because some techniques of some of the stages of the model open me to a greater opportunity of imagining a whole lot of ideas which can easily start writing.