My Writing Process

McPhee, Nic. Editing. 1/26/2008 via Flickr. Attribution-ShareALike 2.0 Generic License.  

To be completely honest, writing has never been one of my strong suits and because of that, it's something I tend to try to put off until I absolutely have to do it. Now in high school, the procrastinator technique was still acceptable and I would only stay up a few hours late to complete a paper at the last minute. But in college, I can't squeak by just writing the paper the night before because there is often so much more planning and research involved in writing a college paper versus a simple five page paper in high school that needed maybe 3 citations.

So about halfway through my freshman year of college, I realized I needed a different approach to my writing process, or I was going to crumble real quick. The technique I developed is most similar to the Heavy Reviser approach. Whenever I dive into a paper, I hardly ever have a clear idea of exactly what I want to talk about, and if I do pre-plan my paper, I end up hating the way the paper turns out. Pre-planning has always reminded me of my elementary school days when my teachers forced us to create a specific written-out plan before we ever started our paper. It always made me feel like my papers were much too formulaic and I felt like I really didn't have the freedom to express my ideas as they came to me.

Because of this, I have turned to the Heavy Reviser approach. This approach has proven to be incredibly beneficial to me so far in my college career. It allows me to just get my ideas out, even if they aren't completely polished or in the correct order at first, and then go back through and read my paper, editing for more proper grammar, better organization and a more polished and clean paper overall. Sometime, this is more difficult, especially if the paper is a longer one, because I start to run out of ideas about half- way through, in which case I have to edit the first half to my liking, and then continue writing.

I guess I could try going back to planning out more of my paper before starting it, especially for the longer papers,  but the thing that bothers e the most about that approach is that I feel like I have to have every detail of my paper planned out before writing, For some writers, this is absolutely necessary, but I find that some of my best ideas come from starting to write a paper and then having a compilation of ideas build up together, until I reach one strong, focused argument. Sometimes this approach can take a little bit longer because I have thrown out half a paper before simply because of the fact that I hated the way it sounded read out loud. However, in the end, this harsh criticism of my paper ends up working in my favor. I always tell people I am my hardest critic, because I really am. This technique works so well for me I think because I am very hard on myself, and I will change an entire paper if I don't like the way the first draft turns out.

At least for now, this approach works really well for me and I always end up with a paper that I am very satisfied with. Not only does this prevent me from procrastinating my paper, but it also forces me to criticize and analyze my own work constantly, which I think is completely necessary for a writer's development.