Strategies before Writing

My writing process has always begun with reading. In terms of reading course material, like articles given during class, I always skim the reading during class in order to get the gist of it and develop my own perspective on the matter. However, afterwards, I go back to the article after class and meticulously read the whole thing through in order to develop more of a perspective on the piece of writing. I generally read fast, reading through the introduction, topic sentences, and even the conclusion to get a holistic understanding of what the article may be talking about. In terms of annotation, I like to highlight key things like names of important people and quotes, in order for me to clearly recognize things I would like to quote in my own papers.

Fig. 1. Evidence from an article printed for class.

The way that I detect author bias within pieces of writing is through the way that the author is writing. If the stance on the piece of writing is passionate, it is prone to using hyperbole and persuasive styles of writing that indicate that there is a bias to the writing. When evaluating the value of a piece of writing, considering authorship, sponsorship, relevance, and currency of writing material is always important. The authorship of a piece of writing is important to evaluate because it considers the legitimacy of your author and whether or not their acumen is for this topic. As for sponsorship, sponsorship allows for the piece of writing to establish its legitimacy through evaluating the importance of who is endorsing the writing. For relevance, it is important to evaluate this because, while a source can be a valuable and legitimate source, it does not entail its’ importance to your writing. Finally, for currency, the time period of the piece of writing can be important on different circumstances. The more recent a piece is the more refined it can be, but a piece of writing from the past is also important to get a perspective of the previous time period.

The pre-writing and brainstorming period, in my opinion, is just a time to write. During the brainstorming and pre-writing period, I just write whatever comes to mind about my topic. For example:

Fig.2: The pre-writing/brainstorming stage of my Literacy Narrative

Evidently, this early version of the Literacy Narrative begins like any story; in the beginning of the story. But, the difference in this version is that the intro is very lengthy and very drawn out, thus making the entire intro to the piece of writing unappealing to most people. This lengthy introduction is because of the spacing of the writing and the inconcise writing.

Fig. 3: Improved introduction for Literacy Narrative.

Here is the improved introduction. I do not generally write outlines, but when one is given to me it is very helpful to how I structure and set the formality of my writing. The best strategy that I personally use when I pre-write is voicing my words aloud while I write so that I could just go with the motions of the writing. When I draft, I find it easiest to just go down the list when I write. I start with the introduction, then the first body paragraph, second body paragraph, third body paragraph, etc. then the conclusion. It’s easiest that way for me because it makes the piece cohesive since I’m doing all the thinking in a straight, structured way.

Collaborating with peers during the editing part is valuable because you get a new set of eyes on your writing piece, thus they can see the errors you might have glossed over or they can improve on things you have not thought of. I went to the writing center in order to improve my Diagnostic/Process analysis paper. That interaction was also valuable because they are a more skilled writer than I am and can easily edit and improve the writing, while also keeping the style of writing that I had. Through these interactions with my peers and the writing center, it allows my writing piece to be more easily consumed as a piece of writing because people, who aren’t myself, are reading it and telling me if it is coherent. When I am allowed to look over and give feedback on another person’s piece of writing, I usually like reading it for myself and I usually ignore the writing prompt handed out to us during class and instead write direct, specific comments with questions on the paper itself so that the person can read the comment while reading their writing easier. Plus, by being more specific and asking questions, it helps the other person question their own writing so that they can improve on their own accord.

Revising a paper requires re-reading your writing along with the comments given to your by your peers. When I become unsure of my writing after I get comments on my writing, I usually rewrite it from the start. That was the case for the Summary and Response paper because I did not have a succinct main idea for my paper, only having the summary part and not knowing what I should do for the rest of the paper, thus I restarted from the beginning. When I started from the beginning, I kept the same idea of agreeing and disagreeing with Ms. Angela Helm and the thesis stating that Harlem has a history of cultural change, but how the people of Harlem do not have to comply with history. Through keeping those, I focused the articles to searching what the cultural history of Harlem was like and thus focusing my paper.

Fig.4: Initial Pre-writing/ Brainstorming for Summary and Response paper

The thesis is usually what I create first before writing, thus rewriting my thesis is very rare. I create the thesis while I meticulously read through the article a second time after skimming through it in class. A paper that I did not have to do a lot of revisions for was my Exploratory essay because I believed that it wrote itself because of my knowledge of how to write art history papers and how to formally analyze art in order to find similarities.

The editing stage of writing requires another set of eyes that are not mine. I usually have someone else read it, allowing their new eyes to see errors that I haven’t seen. I also read my work aloud in order to catch grammar errors.