Exploring Your Own Writing Process

For me, writing is very situational. I have to feel like writing to actually produce anything of note. For essays like personal statements, I’ll need time to myself to sit down and reflect upon what I want to communicate to the reader. Once I settle upon an idea, if I feel like my thoughts are coming and going too fast for me to record using the traditional pen and paper, I’ll switch to my laptop because it is just faster to record my thoughts that way. Just coming up with an idea is not always enough for me however; to stay motivated on finishing a thought, I like to keep music on to add a sort of background soundtrack to what I’m thinking about. Right now in fact, I’m listening to “You Haven’t Told Me Anything” by Keane. It may seem distracting to others but I find that the music helps keep me constantly thinking.

Generally, I will start writing out the thoughts I have without any real order or grammatical correctness in a stream of consciousness fashion. Once I feel like I have several strong ideas, I’ll look over it and begin to reorganize what details connect to each other. I create a rough outline in this way and begin to rework sentences to be more coherent and fleshed out in concept. I compose better when I’m writing the real content of the paper first, that is, everything besides the traditional introduction and conclusion, which I typically save for last. I like the concept of a thesis because developing one helps me focus on the main points of the paper but I realize that having one is not applicable for every piece of writing.

After constructing some semblance of what the paper will be, I like to close it and not look at it for a few hours or a day even, if time permits. Leaving it alone and doing something else gives me a chance to clear my head so upon revisiting the paper, I can decide if I really want to keep a certain thought in the final paper. Reviewing my thoughts is especially important because I don’t want to have people read my writing if I don’t agree with it.

I’ve edited many papers for content as co-editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook and in other English classes. While things like grammar shouldn’t be overlooked, the copies for the yearbook needed to be reworked for content especially multiple times in order to represent and appeal to the student body, the ultimate audience of the staff’s writings. Other than that, peer review sessions have not been entirely helpful as many just look for easy fixes like grammatical mistakes. Also, when a peer reviewed a paper, the paper would be mostly complete; no one wants to be the killjoy to say that they should rethink a major portion of their paper.