| Here are the steps in a typical writing process:
1. Doing research and brainstorming
2. Preparing a draft
3. Revising for completeness and organization
4. Editing for grammar and spelling
5. Publishing
After you have completed the research phase, you should do a quick draft to capture your thoughts. If you have access to a computer, you may want to type your draft in a word processing application. Using a computer may make the revising and editing phases of your writing easier.
Once you have a quick draft, you should revise your document. The goal of the revising phase is to improve your writing by making it clearer, more organized, more interesting, more informative and more convincing.
Revising your draft involves 'Four Rs':
- Requirements Checking: Here check your draft against the requirements or needs of your writing task. Ask yourself what else should you include to address the needs of your reader.
- Rearranging Content: Move your paragraphs around to obtain a good logical flow. Make sure you have a good introduction, body, and conclusion. If any of your paragraphs contains more than one idea, consider breaking it in to multiple paragraphs.
- Removing Content: If you see any unnecessary or redundant information, remove it at this stage. If your writing task has a size limitation, prioritize your ideas and remove some of the material to meet the constraints.
- Replacing Content: Check if you can replace any words, sentences, or details to make your writing more interesting and more convincing.
The editing phase involves checking your writing for grammar, spelling, and usage. Here are some suggestions to help you during the editing phase:
Grammar Checking
- Be sure that every sentence has two parts: subject (who or what) and predicate (what is happening)
- Use sentence combining words: and, but, or, yet, so, who, whom, which, that, whose
because, although, when, if, where, and others
- Use periods and commas where necessary but do not overuse.
- Do not overuse the exclamation mark!
Spelling Checking
- If you use a word processer for writing your selection, use the built in spell checker, but be sure to also manually check for spelling errors because the automatic spell checker will miss any mistyped or misspelled words that have a correct spelling for some other word (for example, 'is' spelled as 'it').
Directions: Select any topic of your interest, do research and write a quick draft. Using the suggestions given above, revise and edit your writing. Write your final copy neatly and have it reviewed by your parent or teacher.
|
