The Writing Process Explained

hello friends and welcome back to the channel in today's essay what I'm going to be doing or today's video rather what I'm going to be doing is talking about some essay writing basics and this is the writing process so most of you have written essays before you've been asked to do them but what I wanted to do is walk you through the process of writing an essay and particularly what I am talking about is the process of writing a take-home essay I will do a separate video on timed writing because the process is a little

bit different for timed writing so what I'm gonna do is walk you through the basics of this and show you the different parts of the writing process so that you can get things done I have found that sometimes the reasons that students get stuck on essays is that they're not quite pinpointing where they are in the writing process and a lot of times it has to do with people sort of putting one part of the writing process in front of the other instead of doing everything in order so I'm going to show you everything you

need to learn about the writing process right here in this video [Music] [Music] this is where it really takes off [Music] there you have it so there's the writing process but seriously so what uh what you can learn from this house time lapse is some of the general principles behind writing an essay writing an essay follows some of these principles but not all of them so in this case what you can see is it's a step by step it is a long process it doesn't happen overnight it's not like you start on a Tuesday and

then instantly by the end of the night you've got an essay or you've got a house there's a step-by-step process and procedure that you need to follow what I'm going to do is break this down into four main parts of the essay process one for each part of the house if you will so one two three so the first part of the writing process in order to get things done is prewriting so prewriting is essentially here alright so before they start putting anything up what you can see here is they are getting things ready there

they're getting things ready to build the house the house is not being built yet there are no boards going up they are preparing alright and then later as you can see there they're even gathering some materials laying the foundation if you will to start getting things done so in the same way prewriting is everything you do to prepare for the essay before you start writing this can include reading the prompt carefully writing an outline brainstorming getting feedback from a tutor or from the professor free right and in the case of papers that require research or

outside sources or even require you to use a paper or a material from in class all of the papers in my class will require you to use quotes or material from some readings whether those ones that I provide you or ones that you find on your own but either way leading the source material I couldn't tell you the number of times I've helped a student and the students come into the Writing Center instead like all right well I'm working on this essay okay so it says you need a reference you know to short stories by

Mark Twain have you read them no ok that's the case and that's the first thing you got to do um all of these things are necessary now one thing that you'll notice is that some teachers are different than others not every teacher teaches the same way not everybody is going to expect the same things so some of these some of this advice that I give you is going to be specifically for my class in my class this is the single most important part read the prompt and do exactly what it says so in my class

I only pull up my essay packet here in my class what I have done for every single essay is I have given you detailed instructions all right and you have it for all of them all right you have it for no interesting timed writing trees nothing here in the table of contents but it is here interesting anyway you have the instruction map all right my dogs are upset as the neighbors are doing some yard work um we're gonna sort of try to uh move around so you have the instructions to every single essay that I've

already given you all right you have it now so you can start working on it now and what I need you to do is really really pay attention closely in the prewriting section what I will do is I will have this section of the essay that says prompt all right and in this case I will ask the questions that I want you to answer it in the essay there's nothing worse than a student who writes a great essay about something that the teacher did not ask for you know it's like you know if you're if

you are playing sports and you shoot a three-pointer well that's great unless you're playing football because you've you're playing football the three-pointer doesn't matter same thing goes with essays if I ask you to do something and you do something else it might be the greatest something else I've ever seen but you're getting enough all right so you want to read the prompt carefully and in my essay prompts I go over a lot of these things so I have I have the the specific questions I want you to answer and then I have this long section

about requirements and advice I tell you what your thesis needs to look like I tell you if you need to add any definitions I tell you how long it needs to be how many sources you need to use how many times you need to use them I will tell you who your audience is meaning you know who are you I will give you a little bit of structure and tell you give you a sort of an idea of how to put the essay together I give you all of those things it is your job to

do all of that as part of the prewriting process read it carefully and then if you have trouble come and see me but overall that's part of the prewriting process it's everything you do before you prepare to write the essay and just like building a house the more you prepare the better you're not gonna start this just winging it you're not gonna think how am I gonna do an essay today or how am I gonna build a house today No you've got blueprints same thing with an essay you're gonna follow the prompt the prompt is

like your blueprints so that is the first part of the writing process which is prewriting getting everything ready next is writing the essay just kidding next is your rough draft so writing the rough draft is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the writing process a lot of times what ends up happening is that students will try to write in one draft it almost always fails it almost always fails the reason being is that you simply can't do it that quickly the writing process requires iteration it requires you to go through more than one draft

and to pay attention to what you've written because if you don't there's going to be it's simply not going to be quality work almost nothing that's ever been published was written in a first draft this is something to keep in mind so really if we're comparing the time lapse to a rough draft you're not looking at the finished product here essentially what a rough draft looks like is about here so as you can see here obviously know what we know what we're building this is largely house shaped but it's not done yet and it's not

even supposed to be done yet this is the rough draft in fact some people have even called it the shitty rough draft because essentially there is no other way to write a rough draft than a shitty rough draft and the point there is not meaning that your your essay is going to be bad eventually but you have to get something down on paper so a rough draft is taking ideas and putting them in essay form the rough draft is not finished nor is it trying to be all right you want to put it in the

essay form you want to get something done but it's not finished yet and this again is the example I would give here you have it's largely the right shape that it's supposed to be but it's not done yet and the reason that I encourage people to think of their rough drafts as as not done is because a lot of times the question about is it perfect ends up becoming paralyzing think Oh am I doing this right I don't know give it a shot oh is this gonna be get a good grade I don't know give

it a shot cuz you want to know what's not gonna get a good grade this if you don't write it you're not gonna get a good grade you have to actually build something alright until it looks like this you can't even be in to worry about if it's perfect you know in this case oh is it does it look shiny and new is the paint job good well I don't know cuz you haven't built a house yet you know some students will you know build part of a house and then they'll obsess over oh my

gosh did I do this part of the house right I don't know you haven't finished it yet what you need to do with a rough draft is get to the point that it's done or at least that the structure is there then you can start worrying about doing it better give you another metaphor I'll mix metaphors but you know well so when we talk when you know writing is somewhat similar to ceramics in the sense that what you're doing is you're you're you're building this this ha and you have to sort of carefully adjust it

to shut to shape it in just the right way but in many ways what you need is a starting point what you need is this okay that's what you need to start with so if you want to mail this you have to start with this all right and that is sometimes frustrating but hey got to start somewhere so whether I'm going to use this metaphor or that metaphor that's your rough draft even if it's a pile of crap you have to start with something all right next the next two parts the writing process a revision

you might be thinking wait revision and editing isn't that the same thing no it's not revision is very different from editing and if you go straight to editing you're not gonna do well right because think about what would happen if you started painting this house you can't live in this house you know this doesn't have insulation it doesn't have it's it probably doesn't have its outer coating it doesn't have its roofing it doesn't excuse me it doesn't have probably its indoor plumbing you can't live in this house I mean technically you could probably wait out

a storm in it but you can't live there yet revision is taking it from here to about here so in this case what you're doing between here and here is you are fleshing things out you are finishing the job here we've get paint we get a roof we get windows we get plumbing we get insulation we get all this stuff to make the house livable now you could live in this house all right it might not be the ideal living space but you could live in this house you can't live in this house but you

can live in this one all right and so moving from the metaphor back to writing revision is adding hang out moving around and fleshing out big picture aspects of the essay so adding taking out moving around and fleshing out big-picture aspects of the essay you're focusing on stuff like the big-ticket items in this case you need to add an example do you have your sources it are things cleared them you need to move that paragraph around have you explained yourself these are all the big picture items that you're going to be looking at in the

essay and that is similar to the house insulation and plumbing are more important than what color the mailbox is going to be these are some of the things that you're thinking about finally then we get to editing and editing is where you take it from here which is livable but you probably don't want to put it on the market yet to hear where it's ready to sell all right now what we have okay they finish the driveway the finish the garage door they planted their there their vegetation they did the lawn now it's all perfect

and ready to go that is similar to the editing process the editing process is looking at small picture errors and mistakes in the essay paying attention to spelling grammar format style word choice etc so with editing it serves two different purposes the first purpose is you want to make sure that everything is correct because it's a little bit like um well it's like a paint job so in this case paint has two purposes one is it looks nice right things look better when they're painted this house looks better [Music] this house looks better than this

house did partly because it's painted all right it's just nicer looking so that's one of the reasons you should do your editing the other reason you should do your editing though is that it's protective paint protects from the weather right if something is painted it's most likely to be damaged over time by stuff like rain the same thing goes for your essay there is nothing worse than an argument that is ruined by a simple editing mistake so let's try this one further on for size Microsoft the word already knew what my hair was but in

this case what I have done is I have written a sentence with a humungous error I used the wrong there in this case th e IR means belonging to them and what I need to do is the net there but the problem is that if I leave it like this even though my argument is about a serious topic people don't actually have to engage with me on my argument they're gonna go to that a spelling mistake and that's something that you need to pay attention to when you are making your argument editing and making sure

you have the correct there is a way to protect your argument from the trolls and losers and theatres so that is an overview of the essay process prewriting rough draft revision editing now for the take-home essays that I assign we're going to be going through all four parts of the writing process for their timed writings that I assign there they follow a little bit of a different strategy and I will over that in another video but overall this is the writing process you have learned what you need to learn from here take