THE WRITING

PROCESS
Ajith Cherian
◦ How do you normally start a writing assignment?

◦ What is the biggest barrier to starting a writing assignment?

◦ What are your fears when being asked to complete a writing

assignment?

◦ Are there any parts of your writing process you would like to
improve?

◦ How do you start to think about organizing a piece of writing?

◦ How do you evaluate each piece of writing you complete?

 Seeing Yourself as a Writer
◦ STEP 1: Embrace the “write” attitude.

(a) believing that developing a healthy writing habit CAN, in fact, lead to improvements in the quality of your writing and to stress-

free productivity, AND (b) valuing improvement and stress-free productivity.

◦ STEP 2: Manage the contingencies.

Writing is too fatiguing and unpleasant; almost anything else would be more fun. It’s O.K. to put off writing, to procrastinate. I’m not

in the mood to write; I’m too depressed or unmotivated to write. I feel impatient about writing; I need to rush to catch up on all the

projects that I should already have finished. My writing must be mistake-free and better than the usual stuff that gets published. My

writing will probably be criticized and I may feel humiliated. Good writing is done in a single draft, preferably in a long session.

◦ STEP 3: Deliberate or Deep Practice.

Slow, targeted, focused repetition of specific behaviors—accompanied by persistent correcting of mistakes.

Excerpt From: Goodson Patricia. “Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing.” iBooks.
Typical writing assignments at university

The type of writing assignment that you are required to write at university will depend on
your discipline. However, the following are common in most scientific subjects:

◦ Notes

◦ Essays

◦ Research reports

◦ Lab reports

◦ Reviews of articles or other types of literature

◦ Reviews of the literature on a topic

◦ Reflective accounts

◦ Dissertations
The different stages of the writing process

Break a seemingly gargantuan task into smaller, more manageable, and low-stakes tasks. Each stage of the writing
process contributes to the final product, and the different skills you employ as part of this process will determine the
quality and readability of the text you produce.

These stages generally include:

◦ Analysing the assignment

◦ Pre-writing, including brainstorming and free writing

◦ Researching the topic

◦ Selecting, evaluating and organising information

◦ Planning, drafting and editing your text

◦ Compiling a list of references

◦ Formatting your text

◦ Proofreading your text

Note: The process is may not be linear: elements of it are interchangeable, overlapping or cyclical.
Analysing the assignment
Understanding writing assignments

◦ Read the prompt the entire way through once.

◦ Understand the general topic.

◦ Narrow down on the focus of the assignment.

◦ Underline or circle the portions that you absolutely must know. This information may include
due date, research (source) requirements, page length, and format (MLA, APA, CMS, IEEE).

◦ Underline or circle important phrases, instructions or commands.

◦ Think about how you will address the prompt.

◦ Rank ideas in descending order, from most important to least important.

◦ Ask your instructor questions if you have any.

Identify the purpose of the writing assignment
Summarizing: Presenting the main points or essence of another text in a condensed form

Arguing/Persuading: Expressing a viewpoint on an issue or topic in an effort to convince others that

your viewpoint is correct

Narrating: Telling a story or giving an account of events

Evaluating: Examining something in order to determine its value or worth based on a set of criteria.

Analysing: Breaking a topic down into its component parts in order to examine the relationships
between the parts.

Responding: Writing that is in a direct dialogue with another text.

Examining/Investigating: Systematically questioning a topic to discover or uncover facts that are not
widely known or accepted, in a way that strives to be as neutral and objective as possible.

Observing: Helping the reader see and understand a person, place, object, image or event that you
have directly watched or experienced through detailed sensory descriptions.
How can I know exactly what the editor is looking for?
Pre-writing, including brainstorming
and free writing
Freewriting is writing that is free – free from the burden of evaluation,
correctness, and judgment. The point is not to generate something worth
handing in – it is simply to generate something, from general ideas to specific
points you want to work with.

Uses of Freewriting

◦ Generates ideas

◦ Moves you past “writer’s block”

◦ Works through ideas you aren’t sure about yet

◦ Allows you to write without worrying about “right,” “wrong,” “pass,” or “fail”

◦ Helps you to generate more words more freely

Guidelines for Freewriting
◦ Set a time limit. At first, this might only be five or ten minutes. Later it may last longer.

◦ Never stop writing. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or punctuation. If you can’t
think of what to say, write “I don’t know what to say.” Write down whatever is in your
head on the page.

◦ Don’t rush, but don’t go too slowly either. Write the words as they come to you without
editing. In short, write quickly, edit slowly.

◦ Again (because this is important) don’t think about editing, or correctness. Don’t even
think about what the next word on the page should be – just write what comes to mind,
even if it doesn’t relate immediately to what you were saying before.
Researching the topic
The Literature Search

Its goal is to evaluate the state of our communal knowledge on a topic before embarking on a quest of
adding to that knowledge. Because research is about either confirming or refuting existing knowledge
or developing new knowledge, a thorough understanding of the current state of communal knowledge
is essential.
Here are a few hints to improve literature searches:

◦ Do the literature search before performing the research, and certainly before writing the paper.
◦ The next most promising papers to read are often those referenced in the relevant papers you have
already found.
◦ Look in fields outside your discipline (this often means looking for different search keywords, which one
recursively discovers when reading the literature outside of one’s discipline).
◦ While your memory of which previous papers are worth citing is a good start, no one ever knows the
full scope of the literature in even the smallest of niche fields. Do not rely on your memory alone.
◦ When finishing up the manuscript, look for recent publications on the subject. Often, other researchers
are working on similar topics and may have published papers that should be read to ensure that your
manuscript captures the latest communal knowledge in the field.
Using library catalogues
What search terms/keywords should you use if you have been given an essay titled?

‘Is there a practical limit on the height of tall buildings? Illustrate your answer with reference to
some recent skyscrapers.’

you might try:

◦ Skyscraper design

◦ Skyscraper construction

◦ Design of tall building

◦ Construction of tall buildings

Note: If you use a very specific phrase you will probably only find a few titles. ‘Skyscraper
construction’, for example, only produced three items in one library database, but a more
general term such as ‘skyscrapers’ found 57.
You have entered the term ‘skyscrapers’ in the library catalogue search engine, and these are the first
eight results. In order to answer the essay above, which would you select to borrow? Give your reasons.
What am I looking at?

Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapter
Selecting, evaluating and organising
information
Rhetorical elements as a guide to think through your writing
Here are some questions you can ask yourself about audience:

◦ Who is the audience for your writing?

◦ Do you think your audience is interested in the topic? Why or why not?

◦ Why should your audience be interested in this topic?

◦ What does your audience already know about this topic?

◦ What does your audience need to know about this topic?

◦ What experiences has your audience had that would influence them on this topic?

◦ What do you hope the audience will gain from your text?
What preparation do I need to do?
Create a table with some or all of the following headings:

• problem that the research addresses

• background information and relevant references

• elements that validate the level of innovation of the research

• conceptual model, methodology or procedure that the research takes into consideration

• materials, equipment and software used

• method used and the operational steps that the author carried out

• results achieved

• analysis and interpretation of these results

• strengths and weaknesses of the research, the insights demonstrated

• implications for further research

Planning, drafting and editing your text
Tell a story with the ABT template
◦ ABT stands for AND, BUT, and THEREFORE.
◦ AND sets up the basis of your story
◦ BUT brings in the conflict or challenge that grabs audience
attention
◦ THEREFORE pulls things together and moves narrative toward its
confusion
◦ Helps you build a single narrative and keep it moving!
◦ It can be as short as a few sentences!
The Usefulness of a Thesis after Graduation
A. Write a thesis that becomes the foundation of a broader research project that will continue
into the years ahead, if s/he has the means and desire to do so.

B. Develop varied creative, ideational, organisational, and research skills for employment, if
you do the following:

1. Identified a precise topic,

2. Collected documents on that topic,
3. Ordered these documents,
4. Re-examined the topic in light of the documents collected,

5. Organized all this work into an organic form,

6. Ensured that your readers have understood you,
7. Provided the necessary documentation so that readers may re-examine the topic
through the sources.
 Homework
Come prepared with the history, definition,
advantages, disadvantages and the future of an
important concept in your discipline or for your
research.
References

◦ Bailey, Stephen. Academic Writing A Handbook for International Students. 3rd ed.,

Routledge, 2011.

◦ Bottomley, Jane. Academic Writing for International Students of Science. 2nd ed.,

Routledge, 2022.

◦ Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. MIT Press, 2015.

◦ Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, 1973.

◦ Mack, Chris. A. How to Write a Good Scientific Paper. SPIE, 2018.

◦ Wallwork, Adrian. English for Writing Research Papers. 2nd ed., Springer, 2016.

◦ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html
Thank You