My Writing Process

In this post, I will reflect on my own writing process by answering questions pertaining to Dr. Lisa Ede's book Work In Progress: A Guide to Writing and Revising. 

1. Up until today I have never really thought about what kind of writer I am, however now that have put some thought into it I guess I can consider myself to be a planning procrastinator. Unless the topic that I am writing about is something that truly interests me, I will typically delay it as much as possible (though I am trying to change that in college). When I do in fact decide to start thinking about the given topic, I make a detailed layout of all of my ideas, and then jump right into writing.

2. I have realized that I don't really follow any specific approach. Like I said earlier, I definitely fall under the procrastinator and heavy planner classifications.

3. English has typically been one of my strong suits in school, so I guess my writing process has worked pretty well for me thus far in my education. One of the strengths to creating and organizing my my ideas before-hand is that I rarely ever have to worry about what the next topic in my writing will be, or be concerned that I am going off topic. An obvious weakness to my writing technique is the additional pressure that I have to put on myself to produce well-planned and well-written work in brief amounts of time, due to my incessant delaying.

4. Editing and revising are my worst and least favorite aspects to the writing process. I think that If I could get myself to stop procrastinating and leave more time to force myself to look over my work, the additional time allotment for revisions would definitely benefit me in the long run.

Vic. "do it - procrastination concept" 5/30/2011 via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic

Reflection:

Now that I have read about the writing processes of both Clayton and Lauren, I realize that I am not totally alone in my approach to completing assignments, and the way in which I view myself as writer.

Both Clayton and Lauren consider themselves to be procrastinators... it's nice to know that I am  not the only one! However, none of us only fall under simply one classification as writers. Clayton and I both tend to overlook the revision portion of our writing strategies, while Lauren seems to really enjoy editing and re-editing her work. I think that myself and Clayton could learn a lot from Lauren in that regard.

I definitely appear to be the biggest planner of the three of us, but I typically tend to push off my planning more than any other part of my writing process. Maybe a possible solution that all three of us could use to remedy the flaws in our approaches to writing, would be to pre-write for our work and organize our ideas immediately after receiving an assignment. This way all of our thoughts will be on the page and our drafting processes would feel a lot less daunting.