The Process of Writing- Pro Blog Post 3

  
     When I reflect on my process of writing, I think about how far I have come in accepting that writing is an ongoing process. In high school and the early years of college, I saw writing as something that should be planned out in order to effectively communicate an argument, be written, and then be submitted. I went through the steps of the Stages of Writing Model that Flowers and Hayes describe in their "Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." By following these stages so rigidly I often forced myself to stick to what I had planned in prewriting and did not allow myself to explore radically new ideas in the rewriting process. It was not until I assembled my Final Portfolio for English 233 at UWM that I reflected on how these rigid steps of writing were preventing me from growing. At the end of the portfolio, I reviewed my writing process of the past and how I began to change the way I viewed my writing while preparing the portfolio. 

    In examining how I write today, it certainly is not the neat "prewrite, write, rewrite" stage model that it used to be, but rather a free-flowing stream of ideas. Like the Flowers and Hayes article stated, I first set out to decide what the rhetorical problem is and how I want to tackle that problem. Most times the answer I choose for that problem is based on something I already know and feel comfortable with; for example, I will choose a prompt that I know I remember having the most evidence for supporting. Then, I begin to think about how I can categorize the evidence that I do have in the planning process of my writing. However, sometimes when I assess my evidence and try categorizing and justifying it, I realize that it might better answer a different prompt and I change the lens of my writing. When translating these ideas, I may change the categories or redefine why I grouped some categories. Sometimes I even find new examples that I had not previously realized just in going through the process of translating my ideas into writing, which is something I realized just now in writing this. While I am writing any piece, I will usually go back and rewrite the topic sentence or the thesis. Most times I wait to write the introduction paragraph until I've finished the rest of the essay. This process of writing is very free-flowing and it is something that I would have never imagined when I was a novice writer. The amount of freedom I give myself to completely rewrite along the process of writing is something I think a novice writer can be intimidated by. While I have grown to accept the freedom of new ideas that come to me through my writing process, I can understand how this sometimes can mean ideas get jumbled up and can be confusing. For this reason, my "monitor" is always going back through a piece to ensure everything matches up with the topic sentence and thesis. 

    However, the lack of definitive structure that I have in my writing can also be difficult for translating my writing into a digital format. Although I do not have much experience with writing in online spaces or creating for multimodal writing, I think there are some pros and cons to my current writing process. On one side, an openness to revise and rethink my writing will be helpful in opening up to how my writing might change to allow different modes to be expressed. On the other side, a constant desire to change something about the writing might make it difficult to find other modes that can express the writing. I definitely have a lot to learn about digital writing and multimodal creating, however I am interested to see where it will take me and my writing process.