Literacy Studies: The Formal Writing Process

Colleen Griffith
Mar 12, 2024
8 min read

The Writing Process: A Breakdown

Something that I’ve seen on Authortube is about everyone’s different writing process and I have something to say about it. While everyone has their own process when it comes to writing, there is a specific process known in the academic world as The Writing Process. When you hear the word “writing process” what normally comes to mind are people’s specific process when it comes to writing whatever they’re doing. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m not talking about my specific writing process, just the formal stages of writing something. So in this video, I will be referring to this process as the Formal Writing Process. I consider it formal because you learn it in school and I’ve seen it in several textbooks.
If you've watched my channel before you know I’m a teacher and I’m literally going to grad school for literacy studies and this is something we talk about a lot in school, because it’s really important for young writers to understand that you aren’t done writing just because you finished your draft.
but I’ve never really seen an author tube video about the formal Writing Process. It’s always people’s specific process, which is fine for them. I’m going to bring up specific examples in this video, because I learn best by examples, and I’ll link to them and my other sources down below.
Let’s get started

This is a very 101 basic breakdown of what the writing process is and the different approaches you can take.

I’ll go into detail about these stages in a moment, but basically you have 6 different stages of development for your project that flow into each other as you work:

Topic selection: what are you writing about?
Pre-writing: gathering your sources, figuring out main characters, etc.

-Optional: outlining
Outlining is usually lumped together with this because it’s not necessarily something you need to do depending on what you’re writing
For example, if you are writing a poem, you most likely won’t make an outline, you’ll just get to writing.

Drafting: this is when you put pen to paper or open a new document and put words on the page.

I’m going to do a whole video on my personal drafting process later because this video is already gonna be a doozy.

Revising: the task of improving writing-specifically by changing structure or word choice. It’s when you change how you phrase things and how you structure your story.

Typically you go back and revise after you finish the first draft, but some people don’t
If you are writing a novel, this is the part where most people get stuck.

Editing: fixing basic errors like capitalization, punctuation and spelling.

Please do yourself a favor and edit AFTER you finish revising or you will just make more work for yourself.

Publishing: giving your work to the audience to be read, performed, etc.

In the formal writing process, this isn’t publishing as in putting your book in Barnes and Noble. It’s like sending off to a publisher, giving it to your beta readers, handing the paper into a professor, submitting it to a magazine.
Getting to the publishing part is really hard and a really big accomplishment that you should definitely celebrate.

Depending on your style of writing, you might fluctuate around the different stages. Something very important for writers to understand that we talk about in literacy studies is that this is a fluid process, meaning you can move around each stage depending on what’s right for you. If it’s your writing time and you can’t bring yourself to draft, it’s okay if you decide to revise an old section or go back and change your outline.

Now let’s dive in a little deeper.

Topic selection: what are you writing about?

This is the part where you figure out what you are writing and what your end game is.
If it’s non-fiction, then you’re figuring out what your topic is and your thesis statement.
If it’s poetry, you’re figuring out what the subject of your poem is.
The subject can be the person you’re talking to, if you want to address a specific person, or the subject you are writing about.
If it’s a fiction piece, then you’re figuring out the basic premise of your story.
For Harry Potter, the basic premise is that an orphaned boy finds out he has magic powers and goes off to a magic boarding school. That’s it.
For Gilmore Girls, the basic premise is a young mother and teenage daughter navigate through life, but as best friends.
Your premise is kind of like the first episode of a TV show where everything else is being set up.
What makes this situation unique from the other people in the story?
What would make the audience member go “oh, interesting…”
After you figure out the premise, figure out WHY you are writing this story.
This is something that your reader will be figuring out as they read, especially if you are writing for younger children, and it’s something you should think about as well while you write.
There are three basic reasons why authors write:
Persuade
Inform
Entertain
Note: all of these reasons are equally important. One is not better than the other. You may feel that one is, but as a whole they are all important. AND a lot of times, they overlap.
The Great British Baking Show entertains it’s audience and also informs them about baking.
Newspapers generally inform people about events and sometimes try to persuade them one way or another about how they should react to the event.
Comedians and musicians entertain people, but there is usually some level of truth to what they say and they are informing people about something they didn’t know.
They can also be done in unexpected ways
In her book of poetry Depression and other Magic Tricks, Sabrina Benaim has a conversation with her mother where she tries to explain and INFORM why she can’t get out of bed some days and why she can’t sleep either, and in another one she talks about why she is going to the grocery store because she doesn’t want to be alone with her own thoughts.
She’s trying, and succeeding in my opinion, to explain to the reader and also her mother what her depression does to her brain, how she feels, and how it makes her act. She does it in a way that isn’t factual like you would expect something informative to be. She isn’t rattling off statistics about people with depression going to the grocery store and the correlation. She uses emotion through her poetry to convey how she feels, and inform the reader that way.

Pre-writing: Some people lump this together with topic selection, but I like to give it it’s own stage because I feel there is a distinct difference between pre-writing, and topic selection.

Pre-writing takes place after topic selection.
This is where you do your research, figure out the plot of your story, or the main quest if you will.
If you’re a planner, this is where you will start outlining here.
If you’re a pantser, this is where you will at least figure out the beginning of your story so you can take it from there
If you don’t like planning or pre-writing is getting you bogged down, then you should at least have a loose idea about what’s going to happen or what you’re going to say.
I recommend setting a deadline for you to finish the prewriting stage so you can get to writing.
The reason why is because most people, especially if they are writing a book, don’t leave this phase. They spend too much time on their outlines and then they don’t write the book.
It’s like a school project, you don’t want to spend too much time doing the prep work and not enough time actually getting it done.
Remember, you can always go back to work on your outline while you are drafting and revising. It’s not written in stone. I promise I won’t tell anyone if you do this. It’ll be our little secret

Drafting: this is where you actually start writing.

When you are drafting, I think it’s very important to think about your writing in either story beats or have some type of plot structure in mind while you write.
The reason is because the first time I wrote a book I was taking advice from an author tuber who did not say that and it made writing my first book really hard because I had too much story.

Revising:

“In composition, revision is the process of rereading a text and making changes (in content, organization, sentence structures, and word choice) to improve it. During the revision stage of the writing process, writers may add, remove, move and substitute text (the ARMS treatment)”
This is where you will make the deep cuts. A structural revision to your book, moving scenes around, etc. To do this, the easiest way is to break your story up into scenes or chunks. The reason why I say scenes and not chapters is because a chapter is made up of several scenes that line up together and if you are doing a structural edit, this won’t help you move scenes around.
Making these types of changes is extremely frustrating if you are working in Microsoft word or Google Docs, so what you can do is save each scene as a separate document and try to put them in a specific order, then transfer that into one manuscript. I did that during my first attempt at writing a novel and it was awful.
If you can, I highly recommend using scrivener, especially if you are writing a longer project. You can get it on your computer as a program for like $99 I think, or you can get in the app store for an iPad or iPhone for like $20.
If you can’t get scrivener for whatever reason and need to use a cheaper alternative, those do exist. I have a link to those resources down below. I can’t vouch for them because I’ve never used them, but they exist and people should know about them.
When you are revising you want to think about story arcs, character development, the purpose of each scene, etc.

Editing: fixing basic errors like capitalization, punctuation and spelling.

Please do yourself a favor and edit AFTER you finish revising or you will just make more work for yourself.
When you are editing, I have two bit tips for you:
Use some digital type of grammar tool to help you like Grammarly or Hemmingway because the computer is more likely to catch mistakes than you are.
Read your manuscript out loud or have it read to you out loud
My mother was an english major and she always said the best way to edit is to read whatever you wrote out loud because you’re more likely to notice things like awkward wording when you say it out loud. That’s why most of the time when writers read a section of their book at meet and greets they change the words as they read it out loud. Your brain will try to make sure it is reading something that makes sense and is clear.

Publishing: giving your work to the audience to be read, performed, etc.

In the formal writing process, this isn’t publishing as in putting your book in Barnes and Noble. It’s like sending off to a publisher, giving it to your beta readers, handing the paper into a professor, submitting it to a magazine.
Getting to the publishing part is really hard and a really big accomplishment that you should definitely celebrate.

Let’s summarize what we learned:

Topic selection: what are you writing about?
Pre-writing: gathering your sources, figuring out main characters, etc.
Drafting: this is when you put pen to paper or open a new document and put words on the page.
Revising: the task of improving writing-specifically by changing structure or word choice. It’s when you change how you phrase things and how you structure your story.
Editing: fixing basic errors like capitalization, punctuation and spelling.
Publishing: giving your work to the audience to be read, performed, etc.
There are three basic reasons why authors write: