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Activities for Writing Process Knowledge

  

Activity 2.6A

Each writer develops a set of “rituals” when they write (even if they do not realize they are doing it). These rituals can be helpful and effective (such as organizing your notes before you write or finding a quiet place) or not as helpful (such as stopping writing every five minutes to check social media or to text). It is very important to develop rituals that maximize your effectiveness as a writer. This assignment will help you become aware in a meta-cognitive way of your own writing process, i.e. how you get writing done. Respond in detail to the following questions:

  • What rituals do you practice when you write?
  • How do you think these rituals got started?
  • Have they changed over time or do they change in different places or when doing different kinds of writing?
  • Does your use of various technologies/devices form or change your rituals?
  • Have your writing rituals changed since you have come to college—or how do you anticipate they may or may not change?

Activity 2.6B

In the following activity, work with a rough draft you have recently completed. You can complete this activity on your own and working with your own draft. You can also complete this task in a small workshop group and apply the questions below to your classmates’ rough drafts. As you work through the tasks below, remember that your goal is to find focus of your writing, to narrow your subject down to a manageable research question or set of questions that you can then investigate in your piece. Work through the following tasks thoroughly. Take adequate notes and record your answers and ideas. If you are reading someone else’s writing, be sure to discuss your findings with the author.

  • Read the draft carefully, several times if necessary.
  • As you read, underline or highlight words, sentences, ideas, or paragraphs that, for whatever reason, seem important or interesting.
  • What ideas, stories or arguments is the draft trying to convey or advance? Does it have a “center of gravity,” a central or important point or idea? Perhaps it has several such centers, in which case you will want to take note of them all, as each can later become the project’s focus.
  • Which of the ideas, stories, or arguments in the draft are worth developing further and which ones can be discarded? Remember that these ideas and arguments must be interesting and important not only to the writer but also the potential readers of the project.
  • Try to plan for the next draft keeping in mind the focus (or foci) that you found going through the preceding questions.
  • As a result of this activity, your piece may take a completely different direction from the one you originally envisioned. Therefore, radical changes in your draft will likely be necessary. You will probably need to rewrite and rearrange whole sections and paragraphs of the project, add new details, examples, and arguments while discarding some of the old ones.

Activity 2.6C

In the “fat” draft activity, you are asked to double the length of your current draft. It does not matter where in the draft you add the material as long as the next version of your text is twice as long as the previous one. It does not even matter all that much whether the sentences and paragraphs you are adding are good enough to stay in final version of your project. Remember that you are making meaning as you revise, and it is important to generate as many options and ideas as possible in the process of revision.

In the “Writing Between the Lines” activity, you are also required to double the length of your current draft, except here you add a new line underneath every existing one. Computers make this kind of text manipulation easy. The content of every new line you add will, in some way, be related to the line that precedes it. The lines do not need to dovetail into one another smoothly, and the transitions between them do not have to be seamless. Although the organizational decisions you will make about your project later on may be influenced by what you write now, your primary concern should not be the structure of your project or transitions between paragraphs and sentences. Instead, you should focus on generating as much material as possible by adding explanations, details, new research, descriptions, and so on.

Activity 2.6D

This activity will work best if completed between the first and the second drafts of a research project. As in previous exploratory tasks of this chapter, you can apply the questions below to any research project you are currently working on. And, as with previous activities, you can either apply these questions to your own draft or to the drafts of others in a small workshop group. As you work on the questions below, use the notes that you took about your first draft during the previous exploration activity.

  • Review your first draft. Get an idea of what it is saying, but try not to look at it as a sum of introduction, body, and conclusion. Instead, evaluate the ideas and concepts presented in it and try to decide how well they answer your research questions.
  • Try to make some plans for revision. Use the revision strategies and techniques discussed earlier in this chapter as well as feedback from other readers.
  • Now review the research results which you obtained during the first round of searching. What do they do and not do to answer your questions? Revisit your research questions and try to revise them. Next, go back to the library and the Internet and conduct another round of searching, guided by your current, post-first draft vision of your topic and of your project.

Activity 2.6E

This cut and paste technique is likely to help you revise on two levels. It will probably help you focus your writing better by showing which parts of your draft belong there and which ones need to be discarded or rewritten. But it may also help you to revise for development and detail by highlighting those parts of your project which need additional explanations, descriptions, scenes, stories, and so on.

  • With a pair of scissors, cut your draft into paragraphs. In my experience and that of my students, printing and cutting the project works better than manipulating the paragraphs on the computer screen because it seems to allow the writer to remove him or herself better from the current form of the text.
  • Lay the paragraphs out on a table in front of you. Make two piles: in one pile, put the paragraphs which seem to fit in with the focus of your project the way you currently see that focus. Put all the other paragraphs in the other pile.
  • Begin working with the second pile by reading through the paragraphs. Try to decide which of them can be rewritten and improved and which ones can be discarded. Don’t be afraid to get rid of the material that does not fit into your design for the project.
  • Now, consider the first pile and decide whether any of the paragraphs in it should be re-written.
  • Combine both piles. Try to create a new version (or several versions) of your text by arranging and re-arranging the paragraphs in several different ways. Remember that you will be revising most, if not all of them.
  • Notice what is missing in this new version. Do you need to add new arguments, details, descriptions, scenes, and so on?

Completing this activity will not produce a finished next draft for you, but it will help you to make some firm and realistic plans for it. Of course, because you have substantially re-seen and re-imagined your first draft, you will have to write some new material to add to the existing paragraphs and complete the next draft.

Activity 2.6F

Sometimes you will be asked to compose in digital media—combining audio and visual elements. Yet, you can also use such media as a tool for revising and editing your written work. For this activity take all or part of a draft of a writing assignment you are working on and create a digital media version. For example, you could add images and/or play with font type and size as well as spacing. You could also use audio, reading your draft aloud and recording it using your phone or computer. You could even use an audio editing program to add additional tracks to your reading of the draft such as music or other sounds. If you would like to incorporate visual and audio elements, you could use a moviemaking program to make a video of all or part of your draft. You could be as high or low tech as you would like with this activity, either drawing on skills you already have or trying to develop new ones. After you create your digital media version, reflect. In what ways did creating this version of your assignment help you re-see your draft? For example, maybe working with audio and/or white space emphasized the need to revise for structure and transitions. Maybe the addition of images made you realize you need to be more descriptive or explain more clearly for readers. Maybe reading the draft aloud you caught a number of inconsistencies and/or editing issues. Overall, to what extent did the digital media version of your draft affect your revising and editing plans for your written final draft?

(Activity 2.6A was adapted from Beaufort’s book College Writing and Beyond; Activities 2.06B-E were adapted from the eBook Methods of Discovery – Online Writing Guide.)