4.1: The Core

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Writing is the Tangible Result of Thinking⁵³.

And learning how to think—how to develop your own ideas and concepts—is the purpose of a college education. Even though the end result of writing is a product, writing itself is a process through which you ask questions; create, develop, hone, and organize ideas; argue a point; search for evidence to support your ideas…and so on. The point here is that writing really involves creative and critical thinking processes. Like any creative process, it often starts in a jumble as you develop, sort, and sift through ideas. But it doesn’t need to stay in disarray. Your writing will gain direction as you start examining those ideas. It just doesn’t happen all at once. Writing is a process that happens over time. And like any process, there are certain steps or stages.

The writing process is something that no two people will do the same way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to write. It can be a very messy and fluid process, and the following is only a representation of commonly used steps. Just in case you weren’t aware of this already:

This image depicts a diagram. At the top is written "rarely does the writing process work like this:" with a series of arrows linearly connecting "brainstorm," "draft," "revise," "edit," "finalize." Below it there is a squiggly line loosely connecting those same steps of the process.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): This visual was created by Sybil Priebe using Piktochart.com.

53 From the Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL), 2019. This site is licensed under a CC-BY license. https://owl.excelsior.edu/writingpro...cess-overview/