My Personal Writing Process

According to Beer (2011), “Writing is a Skill and it can be Improved”. My writing skill started developing from my school days. During my initial school days, I used to become perplexed by the name of writing an essay. I used to find it as nail breaking task. However, as I grew up and got promoted to high school, my skills in writing essays got improved and the same got reflected in my grade sheet. According to Beer (2011), good writers used strategies in order to refine their writing communication skills. My strategy of writing an essay while I was in high school was, first reading the topic given by the teacher and researching about the topic. Initially, the majority of the topics which are assigned to the students while they are in schools are from the subjects which are taught in their classes. So researching and reading about the topic mainly encompass reading the study materials and then structuring the material in a specific flow like introduction, discussion of the body of the essay or blog and finally the conclusion. Since from school, we are taught to make the introduction engaging, crisp and short as this helps to grab the attention of the readers. I always attempted to make my introduction attractive to my teachers or projected readers so that it compels them to read the entire assignment. However, I used to write my introduction at the end. This is because Greetham (2013) highlighted that introduction needs to highlight the main points that will be discussed in the body of the essay. So while writing the main body of the essay, I get an idea about the structure of the essay in detail and then I used to frame the introduction in an attractive manner. At the end I used to write the conclusion. No new concept or data was introduced in the conclusion and it was a summarized version of the entire assignment (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). While writing the body of the essay, I mainly used to break it into various paragraphs with logical flow of writing. At end, I used to revise my work to iron out grammatical errors and typos and then used to submit my assignment. However, like Lamott et al. (2005) said that very few writers know what they are writing until they are done with it. This goes with me as well. Unless I am finished with my task and revise it from scratch, I am always not sure whether my overall approach of writing the blog or essay was correct or not. Another thumb rule of my writing skills is, I never copy other’s work, as I am aware of the plagiarism concern and even if I paraphrase any quotes or other’s idea, I always cite the name of the authors and the year of publication of that particular article.

According to Beer (2011) writing is a slow process that requires concentration and I truly agree with this. Whenever I am with my phone or in-front of TV, I face constant distraction as my mind remains preoccupied with video running on TV or the messages flashing on phone. This kind of distraction hampers my critical thinking skills and I tend to lose my line of thoughts which hampers the quality of my written set of blogs. According to Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015) it is the role of writer to practice rhetorical work in order to address the needs and the interests of a particular audience and any form of distraction force the writer to distract from this preliminary requirement. According to Beer (2011) the first step of writing is financial planning. Under planning there involves making the timeline, selecting a topic and creating the basic outline of the work. This is something different from my planning of writing an essay during schools. Because while at school we do not have scope to select a topic as topic was already assigned to us. However, the rest part of timeline as discussed by Beer (2011) remains same as this includes further planning, research, writing and revision. Beer (2011) stated that planning mainly involves writing on the basis of deadlines so that there is no last minute hurry and revising it before submission. Beer (2011) said that it is the research which consumes the majority of the time while writing an essay or a blog. As per my personal experience, if the research is on right track, the essay or the blog is bound to as per the requirement. However, the concept of research has troublesome but once done can stand out as an effective source of essay or blog writing (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015). Beer (2011) highlighted that goals for achieving the plan must be short term and achievable and within the deadline. In this domain I used to over-estimate myself and used to set achievable goals and this in turn undermined by confidence which hampered my learning. In writing a blog or an essay Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015) highlighted that words get their meaning from the preceding words. I also truly agree with this concept. The study undertaken by Rich (2015) argued that structuring and framing the sentences will be such that the phrases are meaningful with logical flow of writing this increases the overall quality of writing. However, filling the sentences with complex vocabulary is always not mandatory. Depending upon the audience of the writing the context of the phrase the choice if vocabulary must be done.

At the end I want to state it is not possible to transform into a magically strong writer over-writer. Proper amalgamation of strategies, efforts and practice, patience and persistence is what makes you a good writer. I believe that good writing skills will help to refine my effective communication skills and at the same time will help to succeed in my academic and professional life. I also understood that planning in steps and proper time-management and effective thinking skills is all what is required to refine the academic or creative writing skills.

References

1. Adler-Kassner, L., & Wardle, E. (2015). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies.Utah State University Press.
2. Beer, J. (2011, June 2). Writingbusiness ProcessAnimation. Access date: 26^th September 2018. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1pnpL8295E.
3. Greetham, B. (2013). How to write better essays. Macmillan International Higher Education.
4. Lamott, A. Shitty First Drafts. In P. Eschholz, A Rosa, and V. Clark (Eds) (2005). Language Awareness: Readings for College 9th ed(pp93-96). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Retrieved from https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf
5. Rich, C. (2015). Writing and reporting news: A coaching method. Cengage Learnin