Revisiting My Writing Process

Returning To Me As A Writer

In this blog post, I will detail how I react to some of my first blog posts, My Writing Process - Inside the Mind of a Pseudo-Procrastinating Partial-Planner and My Calendar Reflection - Free Time*. I will discuss what kind of writing habits I now have as I reference "Discovering Your Writing Process" from Student's Guide to First Year Writing and I will use that reflection to predict how I will tackle writing challenges in the future.

Brain POP "The Writing Process" 17 May 2010 via flickr.com.
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License.

Revisiting what I wrote in my initial blog posts about my writing habits, I think that I have made honest attempts at changing my writing process throughout this course. In "My Writing Process - Inside the Mind of a Pseudo-Procrastinating Partial Planner," I described myself as a Heavy Planner and also a Procrastinator - both of which were very true of me at the time, and still true of me now. However, despite the fact that I haven't necessarily changed in my habits, I think I made progress in evolving as a writer by trying out new writing methods and strategies, which I believe is commendable.
For instance, with Project 2, I felt that I was on familiar ground in writing a rhetorical analysis essay because I had done so many times before in high school in AP English Literature and AP English Composition courses. Yet, I believe that the length and depth of the Project 2 essay was appreciably larger than essays I had written in the past - which thankfully I recognized before sitting down to write my draft. That observation, combined with the fact that I had procrastinated with blog work and fallen behind in my blog posts for Project 2, led me to trying out something new: basing my draft primarily off of my pre-writing work. Due to the fact that I was completing the many blogposts about rhetorical analysis of audience, appeals, and writing context in close proximity to the draft deadline, I decided to work extensively on those pre-draft blogposts and then incorporate and adapt them into my draft. This was an approach that was outside of my normal writing process, yet in attempting to do it I learned that it saved me a massive amount of time in composing my draft. While I don't think I have learned to consistently apply this approach, I now recognize its value and likely will apply it in the future (as I am right now!).
Additionally, in Project 3, I wrote my draft in a method nearly opposite to my typical process - I sat down one night, and composed my article on Slate.com in that single sitting as ideas came to my mind. In total, the session lasted for about four hours or so, and it was all done in a stream-of-consciousness style. Again, certain conditions led me to doing this - such as how I had moved out not long before and had had trouble motivating myself to do consistent work across many sessions, and how my draft was a bit late, which was an incentive to complete it quickly. But, ultimately, writing an entire draft in one session and not filtering my ideas until revision was extremely uncharacteristic of my writing habits, and was truly very effective for creating a Public Argument that was of high quality and had an organized structure through an arc of thought - which clearly came from how I approached writing it in the drafting stages.

As far as time management goes, I think I honestly failed to grow as a writer during this semester. Often, I felt that I was working against the Saturday deadlines in photo-finish scenarios to avoid late penalties. And in other instances, I had to become a little too familiar with the late policy for my liking. As I concluded in my semester weekly calendar post, "My Calendar Reflection - Free Time*," I declared that if I efficiently used my time on campus (which I designated as "Free Time*"), I could easily finish my coursework without burdening my workload at home. However, as I found throughout the semester, I frequently used my time on campus to either unwind or, as was the case on my Wednesdays when I had the most Free Time*, to complete annotations and readings for my creative writing course. The result of this less-than-effective use on time on-campus was that I often fell behind in the coursework blogposts for this class, which led me to stressing and working up until (and sometimes after) the Saturday deadlines. In the future, I really believe that I need to acclimate to new settings more speedily and establish a working method that yields steady, consistent progress.

In reflecting on how my time and effort in this course will predict myself as a writer and self-motivated worker through the rest of my years in college and career, I think that I will be a producer of high quality work who operates through stress and heavy consideration of ideas. I say this because, overall, I would characterize my relationship with the work in this class as stressful, but rewarding; I would always stress over every deadline, as I always drew my submissions too close for comfort to the due dates, but I was satisfied with my final products for all of the three major projects once I had completed them.
However, I hope that I will not confirm this prediction. I don't think my stressful writing process is healthy, even if it allows me more time to plan out and consider my drafts and products before I write them. I know that I will eventually need to change my work habits, especially as I enter the workforce both for part-time and for a career, so that I will constantly yield more reliable results and progress in my work. But for that to happen, I need to start actively making those changes happening now, and apply the lessons from my ventures outside of my typical writing process in this class to my courses to come.