Deck 4: The Writing Process

Question 1

What do you see as the key differences between drafting and editing?

Answer 1

When drafting, the focus is on generating content, i.e. getting ideas down. Style, grammar, spelling, and punctuation are unimportant at this stage, and attention to these can impede the generation of ideas. In contrast, these aspects form the focus of editing. Although drafting and editing are best kept separate, this does not mean all the drafting must be done before any editing begins. A session (or several) of drafting might be followed by a session of editing, then more drafting, and so on. While this is probably not ideal because switching between the mindset for drafting and that for editing can take time, switching between different but related tasks can improve learning. Also, while editing new ideas can arise and recording these (a drafting process) is paramount - an idea unrecorded for more than a minute will almost certainly be forgotten. In short, while drafting, stay focused on drafting, but while editing, be prepared to switch back to drafting.

Question 2

Why is revising (between dratting and editing) so important?

Answer 2

Revision focuses on content and structure to ensure the writing says what you intend, clearly. Revision aims to produce a clear, logical structure, without which a piece of writing can be difficult or even impossible to understand. Drafting focuses
on capturing thoughts. Often, writing a draft is a way of firming up vague or half- formed thoughts, so a draft will sometimes involve convoluted reasoning, much repetition, and even dead ends. Revision takes this undisciplined material, strips it of what's unnecessary, arranges the remainder logically, and identifies what might still be missing. In contrast, editing ensures sentences read well, contain no distracting errors, and flow logically within paragraphs. A draft edited without revision might have no errors of grammar or infelicities of style yet still be opaque to the reader because the paragraphs are not clearly focused on single ideas or are arranged in an illogical order, or the beautiful sentences don't actually explain what the writer intended. Editing without revision can lead to writing that represents the triumph of style over content: lovely to look at but otherwise useless. More often, it's just baffling.

Question 3

How should you indicate a quotation in your notes? Why is this important?

Answer 3

Enclose it in quotation marks ('…') and add the bibliographic information, including the page number if appropriate. Stress the importance of clearly differentiating quoted material from personal notes; point out that if students don't do this, they risk quoting material inadvertently without attributing it. This is plagiarism: a serious academic offence. Adding the bibliographic information when first noting the quotation not only helps emphasise that the material is a quotation, but more importantly means if a student wants to incorporate the quotation in an assignment the required referencing information is already at hand. Trying to locate the source of a quotation can be frustrating and time-consuming.
As an aside, you might point out that quotations in assignments should be used sparingly, if at all. Quotations do not demonstrate a student has understood what has been said, and integrating a quotation into an assignment can be surprisingly difficult.

Question 4

List a number of key things you need to do before you start searching for information.

Question 5

Think about your own writing process in the past. In the light of this chapter, how could you improve your writing process? Make a note of any changes you could make that would improve your writing process.