College Writing (ENGLWRIT 112)

Drafting Cycle

We require that the students take most essays they write through a four-step process. As stated in the course Syllabus, one of our central aims is to teach our students a longer and more thoughtful writing process. However, this four-step process does more than that: it makes visible to the students the writing process that most writers go through. In a sense we are decompressing a process that has already been compressed for them. By asking our students to take a paper through this process, we are stretching out the process, slowing it down so they can see and experience the steps that go into writing an essay or any piece of writing. Each "step" we require of our students highlights and focuses on one particular aspect of the writing process. However, it is important to note that despite the linear, step-by-step way the curriculum moves students through this process, most writers move back and forth among these steps constantly, sometimes generating more material after drafting; returning to generating after revising, etc.; thus, modeling for students the recursive way these steps cycle from one another and back again can make this process seem less "lock step" and more in line with how writers actually produce text.