The Writing Process: Steps to Enhance Your Skills and Share Ideas**

1. The Writing Process

2. Why We Write • To become better thinkers and learners • To share ideas or personal experiences • To improve performance and writing in all classes • To prepare for the future • To learn about ourselves or specific issues or topics

3. Prewriting To generate ideas: • Freewrite on the topic • Fill a page with random possibilities to write about • Reread stories, articles, poems, or essays for inspiration • Create a web, list, outline, or cluster • Generate questions • Conduct research

4. Prewriting Once you have decided upon your topic, focus your writing on it: • Write a thesis statement • Gather supporting details • Decide upon a structure that suits your topic • Remind yourself of your purpose for writing • Plan the possible organization of your essay

5. Writing a first draft • Try to capture the reader’s attention • Determine your thesis or main point • Set the tone with word choice, details, sentence length, and literary devices • Ask yourself whether your audience would keep reading • Ignore the desire to be perfect—just write! • Follow or refine your prewriting plan

6. Revising • Reread the first draft • Add necessary details • Cut repeated thought. Eliminate details that stray too far from the message • Reorganize paragraphs for effective presentation • Ask someone reliable to read the draft and help with revisions • Assess the effectiveness of the introduction and conclusion

7. Revising Cont. • Reword paragraphs to make them as interesting as possible by: • Imitating writers you like to read • Copying dialogue exactly as you heard it • Using strong, active verbs • Using exact, concrete nouns (taste, touch, sight, sound, smell) • Using adjectives sparingly • Choosing the exact word to describe the experience

8. Editing and Proofreading • Edit the revised draft for style and word choice • Check for errors in usage, grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization • Use a dictionary, thesaurus, and spell-check • Ask a reliable person to read the draft • Read the draft aloud

9. Publishing • Read the final draft one last time to check for errors • Format the final draft correctly • Use a clear and simple font (Helvetica, Courier, or Times) • Make sure any graphics are clear and simple • Use MLA style for bibliographic citations • Save and print the final draft • Share the final draft with your teacher, friends, and family • After the final draft is evaluated, place it in your class notebook