My Writing Process (It's a Struggle)

To be completely honest, I had zero clue what a writing process was, let alone what mine was . I am painfully unaware of the steps I take when I write, so I figured it was safe to assume that I am very disorganized with my thoughts. Despite being this negligent to my own thinking, I've written a plethora of papers throughout high school and here at the U of A. It just happens. So in order to figure out which type of writer I am, I actually had to act like I was about to write something very long and important, and observe what I would do and how I would feel before, during, and after writing such a paper. Turns out, I'm a bit more organized than I thought...

What kind of writer am I??

          Given the four types of writers, I believe I am a sequential composer. I find that writing my paper goes much smoother when I have written out how I want it to be organized. This helps with time management also. If I have the paper planned out with general ideas in the form of an outline, I can better estimate how much time will be needed per paragraph, and therefore the whole paper. Also, I do find myself revising my work as I go, re-reading sections and paragraphs at a time. I rarely read through the whole paper after I am finished, because I revise as I go.

But what else?

My approach probably is a mix between sequential composer and heavy planner. I am a heavy planner in the sense that I do a ton of outlining in my head before writing anything. However, I rarely think about my writing when I am away from the computer. Although I do not revise as much as I should, I revise more than a heavy planner would, and in the way a sequential composer would—by paragraph or sections at a time, rather than the whole paper at once.

Soooo is this good or bad? Or both?

          I think for the most part my writing process seems to be successful, however I have never tried anything else so I wouldn’t really know. Some strengths would be that I know exactly what I want to write and how the paper will go, and time management is fairly easy. However, a weakness is probably that I don’t revise as much as I should. I definitely need to read the paper or piece as a whole as part of the revision process because that is just as important as revising small sections of the paper as I go.

Am I actually going to change anything?

I believe that it would be beneficial for me to try different aspects of other approaches, rather than ditch mine all together. Because I do like my writing process (now that I actually know what it is) the way it is, but adding techniques from other writing processes could potentially be more beneficial for me in the long run.

Visual Representation of my writing process:

marysaddlernewt. "Current mood . . ." 12/15/15 via Tumblr. Content License.

 Like I said, it's a struggle.