Why is writing recursive

Prewriting happens before a single word goes on the page. This includes things like choosing a topic. Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. It is known as a recursive process.

While you are revising, you might have to return to the prewriting step to develop and expand your ideas. As any experienced writer will tell you, the writing process is recursive, not linear. Once the first draft is in place, they can turn to revision, and the best place to start is with the big picture and then narrow the process. A revision strategy is a systematic process of reviewing and evaluating your writing before you actually begin revising.

You can use the Checklist for Personal Revision to guide your revision strategy or develop a checklist of your own that incorporates a revising schedule.

Revision should be done prior to proofreading. Revision tackles the biggest issues first. The Writing Center can help you with revising or proofreading your paper. Restating your thesis is just a short first part of your conclusion. Make sure that you are not simply repeating yourself; your restated thesis should use new and interesting language. Not only is it okay to do that, but I encourage my students to do that.

The more we write about an idea, the more focused we become in our arguments, and the thesis statement should be revised and changed accordingly.

So, if writing isn't necessarily a linear process, why do we teach it that way? In one word, practicality. It's easier to break any difficult task into smaller steps in order to learn how the steps work. Moving in a linear direction is definitely useful in many writing situations, but students need to be taught that even when we are following steps, writing is still fluid.

It needs to move and to breathe; it needs to sit and to think. Use the recursive graphic with your students to replace the old linear one and to show your students that writing is a recursive process.

The practical way to go about doing this is to work all steps into the writing workshop structure. At the end of a workshop, give students minutes to make any changes to any part of the draft as they see fit.

This could mean adding a new sentence, deleting a paragraph, brainstorming a new argument, changing the thesis statement, or even throwing out the essay and starting OVER! It happens. When it comes to writing, anything and everything can be changed at any time. How do you teach writing as a process in your classes?

Leave us a comment! We'd love to hear from you! She found that their writing process is different from that of student writers:. Yes, they generally begin with invention and end with editing, but they view each part of the process as a valuable way of thinking that can be revisited again and again until they are confident that the product effectively meets their goals. In this process, we produced three distinct drafts, but each of those drafts represents several different ways that we made changes, small and large, to the text to better craft it for our audience, purpose, and context.

One goal of required college writing courses is to help you move from the mindset of the student writer to that of the experienced writer. Revisiting the big ideas of a writing task can be tough. Although your future professors, bosses, co-workers, clients, and patients may only see the final product, mastering a complex, recursive writing process will help you to create effective texts for any situation you encounter.