The Writing Process

Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.

a)      Prewriting

Prewriting is planning stage to decide axactly what will be writing about and how can most effectively present the ideas (Little, 1985:112). From the statement above, we can conclude that prewriting is anything you do before you write on your paper. This stage include brainstorming, clustering, strategic questioning, sketching, free writing, exploring the sense, interviewing, and information gathering.

i)              Brainstorming

Based on a topic of writing performance, students call out as many associations as possible while the teacher (or students) jots them down.

ii)            Clustering

Clustering can be considered the most important unsupervised learning problem; so, as every other problem of this kind, it deals with finding a structure ina collection of unlabelled data. A loose definition of clustering could be “the process of organizing objects into groups whose members are similar in some way”. A cluster is therefore a collection of objects which are “similar” between them and are “dissimilar” to the objects belonging to other cluster.

iii)          Strategic questioning

Students answer a set of questions designed to guide their writing, such as “What do you want to write about?”, “What is your goal?”,”What do you know this topic?”,”What do you need to find out?”,”Who might want to read?”,”What you are to write about?”.

iv)          Sketching

Students draw a series sketches that represent ideas for an essay. For example: The Nasrudin clever man of short story.

v)            Free writing

Students write non-stop on a topic for a set time (e.g. five minutes). They stop to read and consider what they wrote and then write non-stop again for another set amount of time.

vi)          Exploring the sense

Suitable for generating ideas for descriptive essay, the teachers guides students through their senses by asking them to visualize, hear, smell, aand feel a person or place.

vii)        Interviewing

Students interview each other or go outside the classroom to interview people on a particular topic.

viii)      Information gathering

Students collect information about a topic through library research.

b)      Drafting

As the second stage in the writing process, drafting is a series of strategies designed to organize and develop a sustained piece of writing. Once planning has enable us to identify several subjects and encouraged to gather information on thus subjects from different perspectives, we need to determine what we can best accomplish in writing. We need to select one subject and organize our information about it into meaningful cluster. Then, we need to find connections among thus clusters and discover the relationship that links the connections, according to McCrimmon (1984:10).

c)      Revising

Revising is a procedure for improving or correcting a work in progress. As the third stage I writing process, revising a series of strategies designed to re-examine and re-evaluate the choices that have created piece of writing. After we have completed our preliminary draft, we need to stand back from our text and decide what action would seem to be most productive. We may have to embark upon global revision a complete re-creation of the word of our writing. We may be able to begin local revision a concerted effort tp perfect to smaller elements in a piece of writing we have already created, McCrimmon (1984:11)

d)     Editing

According to Gebhard (2000:230), Editing is required to recognize problems in grammar (e.g. subject – verb disgreement, improper pronoun use, incorrect verb tense), syntax (e.g. fragments and run – on sentences), and mechanics (e.g. spelling and punctuation errors). Some students can become lost in thought with editing so much that they equate good writing with correct grammar, syntax, word choice, and mechanics rather than with the expression of meaning of which editing is simply a part.

References:

Vinahari, Risqi. (2011). The Effect of Pair Correction on Writing Performance of the Second Grade Students at MTs Nurul 'Ula Jamsaren Kediri. Skripsi, English Department the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Nusantara PGRI Kediri University.