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2 Recursive Writing Process

Good writing: It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint!

Sometimes in college, your instructors will ask you to write several paragraphs, or even an essay, in a short period of time. Examples include short-answer exam questions and timed writing exercises. This kind of writing allows you to show that you have read and understood the assigned material, or that you have practiced writing in a particular style. You may only have enough time in the class period to write a quick first draft for these types of writing assignments. The purpose of this type of writing is to get your message across clearly and quickly.

However, many times, you will have longer essay assignments which require more reflection and analysis. These assignments will often require that you conduct research to find evidence to support your ideas, and you will be expected to do most of this work outside of class time. This type of assignment uses the recursive writing process . This means that you will follow several steps in your writing journey, pausing along the way to go back to a previous stage, then moving forward, then returning to the beginning, then moving forward again, and so on. Good writers regularly use these steps all the time; you will want to practice using them too. One key to success is to start your journey right away when you get an assignment; do not wait until the paper is almost due to begin your work, because then you will not have enough time to work through the writing process.

Activity ~ Finding Your Writing Process

Directions : Discuss with a small group: What is your writing process? How do you start working on a writing assignment?

Discuss the graphics below with your partners. Have you used any of these steps in the writing process? Which graphic do you like better? Can you draw one that works better for you?

Graphic labeled "The Writing Process." A line of brightly colored circles are connected by gray arrows wrapping around them. From left to right, they read: Topic, Prewrite, Evidence, Organize, Draft, Revise, Proofread.

Good academic writing takes time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there are many steps to writing well. One of the first steps is to make sure that you understand the writing assignment. Your instructor may give you a writing prompt with specific directions; ask for clarification if you do not understand something.

The next sections discuss basic information about some of the stages of the writing process. Remember to practice each of these with all of your writing assignments in our class.

Pre-writing: Why am I writing? What do I already know? What do I want my audience to know/learn?

Before you start drafting your essay, do some pre-writing. Brainstorm ideas, talk to a friend, complete a graphic organizer, draw pictures, freewrite, create an outline and a working thesis statement. At this stage, include all ideas that occur to you; do not edit anything out. You will probably want to return to your pre-writing ideas later in the process.

If you are writing a researched essay, this is the stage to start reading and researching about your topic. This means finding reliable sources and keeping track of them so that you can responsibly incorporate other scholars’ ideas into your own paper.

Drafting: What do I want to say? Where do I need more research?

Once you have some ideas, you can start drafting your essay. You can start with any section: Introduction, Body Paragraphs, or Conclusion. Or you can just start writing a paragraph, and decide later where it might fit. If you wrote an outline in the Pre-writing stage, now you can write paragraphs that fit into your outline.

Feeling stuck? Return to pre-writing. Look at the notes you created earlier in your first pre-writing phase. Is there anything there that you want to write a paragraph about? Is there anything there that you can expand on?

Try some more pre-writing; see if you can discover some more ideas, now that you have started drafting.

At this stage, it is useful to take a break. Put your essay aside for a day or two. After that, you may think of new ideas to incorporate.

Revising & Editing: Which areas need work?

When you revise , you ‘look again’ at your work. This is the time to edit your draft by deleting or changing words, sentences, and paragraphs that do not fit, or by moving them to a better place in your essay. This is also the time to add more information where you need more explanation or support. Return to your Pre-writing ideas, and do more brainstorming, freewriting, etc., if you need to expand some of your sections. Ask a writing partner or tutor to read your draft; it can be very useful to hear a reader’s reaction and advice at this point.

At this stage, remember to re-read the essay prompt. As you read your own essay, ask yourself: Does my essay answer the questions in the prompt? Is my thesis clear? Are all of my ideas connected to my thesis?

Consult this useful Revision Checklist from The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (opens in a new tab).

Proofreading & Publishing: What mistakes can I fix?

One of the very last steps in the writing process is proofreading: checking for errors in grammar, mechanics , and formatting . When you are satisfied that you have done your best, you are ready to publish your work by handing it in to your instructor.

When you post an essay in Canvas, your instructor may allow you to use the plagiarism detection tool. This can help you to find areas where you have unintentionally copied from another source. If your instructor allows this step, be sure to leave yourself enough time to submit the essay and make any necessary adjustments.

Remember: good writing takes time. IT’S A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT!

“Image of Writing Process” (figure 2). Authored by: Kim Louie for Basic Reading & Writing for Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution

"Of or relating to a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding stage." ~ American Heritage Dictionary

statement to be responded to, and/or questions to be answered in an essay

American English: to look again, and make corrections as needed

British English: to study

spelling, punctuation, and capitalization

layout and appearance of words on the page (heading, title, paragraphs, citations, etc.)

ENGLISH 087: Academic Advanced Writing Copyright © 2020 by Nancy Hutchison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Guide to Writing at Stetson University

You the Writer

Writing as a Process: Writing is Recursive

Know the right moves for college writing, build an argument, not an opinion, is every assignment an argument, know the two most important kinds of sentences: thesis and topic sentences, introduce your sources with purpose and show relationships between ideas.

Understand and Use Sophisticated Punctuation

Speaking and Writing English (when it isn’t your first language)
Writing in the Disciplines
University Writing Rubric
A Biology grade rubric
The Four Point scale
General Descriptive Rubric
Information Literacy and Fluency (Research Fundamentals)
General Citations
Copyright Basics
The Writing Reference

Writing is a process. Writers don’t just sit down and produce an essay, well-formed and ideal in every respect--we work at the stages and steps. But writing is not only a process: it’s also a measure of learning and your thinking, and so the process has to stop at various points so that your measure can be taken. Good academic writing is both a process and a product.

Writing is recursive. “Recursive” simply means that each step you take in your writing process will feed into other steps: after you’ve drafted an essay, for instance, you’ll go do a bit of verification of some of your facts—and if you discover that you’ve gotten something wrong, you’ll go back to the draft and fix it. But doing that may well require you to loop back to a different section of your essay to rewrite or to take it out altogether-and that revision, in turn, might mean that you need to rethink your organization. At some point, you know that the work is done.

To be successful at college-level writing, students need to be willing to learn the new moves. Writing for the demands of college is challenging, but it can be a little easier if students understand up front that readers at the college level expect to see certain skills be demonstrated.

Know what a college-level essay looks like in the appropriate discipline (your professors should show you examples)
Keep the focus of your work narrow (don't take on too much! Given the choice, go deep rather than broad)
Compose and revise to create a thesis statement and topic sentences
Introduce your sources with a purpose
Show relationships between ideas
Use sophisticated punctuation

Know What a College Level Essay Looks Like (generally)

While professors at Stetson have specific expectations for what their students turn in, students may not always understand the depth for the expectations. Some professors will show examples of what they want; some will not. In general, while each of your professors will provide a clear assignment, students may benefit from seeing an outline of what that assignment might entail.

The key differences are several:

The need for a clear and directive thesis or purpose statement;
The expectation of substantial consideration of other viewpoints and perspectives;
The use of sources to develop and explore a point made by the writer (not just to support the point itself); and
The need for the conclusion to do something other than summarize

Know What a College Level Essay Looks Like (in your discipline)

Not every assignment students get at Stetson will look like the above list. For example, writing assignments in Life Sciences prioritize a clear discussion of methods and results, often to test the work of others (in which case, using sources "to explore a point" may look very different. Ask your instructor to help you with these differences.

Here is a link to a video that demonstrates how to write a college-level essay.

Many students come to college thinking that “arguing” in an essay means to present a well- supported position. The definition of “argue” thus becomes a defense rather than an inquiry. In the real world, we're accustomed to "arguing" as trying to win. In college, "arguing" means to present a line of thought that takes into account different perspectives, additional evidence, and new ideas as it comes to a conclusion. In other words, a strong argument is one that incorporates both sides effectively.

https://miro.medium.com/max/2700/1*7NKDqKz8LG8bffMQoGIhqg.png

Sophisticated thinkers and writers seek to advance and deepen the understanding via discussion; thus, at college we seek to encourage deeper discussions with the goal to have a richer and fuller understanding. To do this well, it’s important to go deeply into a subject rather than stay on the surface. While the approach of defending a position rather than exploring its layers may feel somewhat easier, there are only so many ways to learn from general subjects; we learn more, and find opportunities for growth and development more easily, when we narrow down the field of interest. As we work with an idea and consider it carefully, we continue to narrow it down, zeroing in on a particular angle or position that interests us and meets the needs of the assignment.

Identifying a position requires several steps:

First , understand the subject area from which the argument must come.
Second , break that subject area down into topics
Third , focus on developing a question whose answer can be identified and defended. As the subject undergoes continual narrowing and focusing, specific questions develop; the reasoned, detailed, careful answer to those questions becomes the argument.
Fourth , read, research, and discuss the potential answers to the question you’re asking so that your writing is multidimensional and well supported. The Guide’s chapter on “Using Your Resources” deals with this element of the process.

Remember: A true argument requires that other perspectives be taken into account, because once you have found a focus and can easily develop an opinion or come to a position on the questions that have been created, this can provide an opportunity for a discussion, exploration of different perspectives, and dialogue about values.

Opinion : statement of writer’s general attitude toward a specific subject, issue or event
Position : announcement of writer’s general attitude toward a specific subject, issue, or event, with explanation of reasons
Argument : statement that captures a spirit of debate and discussion about a specific topic, issue, or event

Not every writing assignment students get in their courses will be an argument essay. As mentioned earlier, students here write lab reports, correspondence, proposals, brochures, arguments, applications, evaluations, analyses, and host of others.

We also ask that students consider and evaluate questions and ideas, formulate their own responses to those ideas, and then do something with those responses: argue, defend, propose, compare, and analyze are some of the things we do with our responses to ideas. Each kind of assignment has a different purpose.

Generally speaking, arguments take two kinds of shapes: one is a shape that actively argues with its reader from the start, presenting its position and systematically defending against its opposition by marshalling evidence that will defeat an opposing viewpoint. This focuses on difference. One other popular shape starts from a position of unity and common ground, and then, as each element of common ground on a position is discussed, the writer’s position becomes clearer.

A strong writer develops through practice in a variety of forms and audiences and purposes. That's why Stetson requires you to have four different writing-enhanced (WE) courses. The practice helps build "muscle" and a set of strategies to respond to new situations.

Students consider and evaluate questions and ideas, formulate their own responses to those ideas, and then do something with those responses. Argue, defend, propose, compare, and analyze are some of the things we do with our responses to ideas. Each kind of assignment has a different purpose.

Generally speaking, arguments take two kinds of shapes: one is a shape that actively argues with its reader from the start, presenting its position and systematically defending against its opposition by marshalling evidence that will defeat an opposing viewpoint. This focuses on difference. One other popular shape starts from position of unity and common ground, and then, as each element of common ground on a position is discussed, the writer’s position becomes clearer.

Here is a link that shows brief examples and descriptions of what assignments students may encounter at Stetson.

Thesis statements and topic sentences perform nearly the same function in your writing: each one makes a claim, or states a main idea, and each one serves as a central focus connecting ideas presented earlier and leads to ideas about to come.

A classic thesis statement demonstrates three specific elements:

It states a main idea, which the essay will go on to explain and develop
It goes beyond statements of fact or announcement-type statements
It offers the reader some idea of the direction of the essay

Writing thesis statements worksheet - The Perfect Dress | Writing ...

Whereas a thesis statement captures the main idea of an essay and provides structure and direction, a topic sentence introduces a paragraph’s main claim or idea. When we read a well put- together paragraph, we can identify the topic sentence relatively easily: it’s the one making a claim, and the other sentences are adding support and explanation. We typically find the topic sentence of a paragraph at the starting or ending position; at the start of a paragraph, the topic sentence makes a claim or point that will then be developed and supported. At the close of the paragraph, the topic sentence brings the reader to a conclusion that's just been made.

Introduce Your Sources With Purpose

Inexperienced writers often us this particular technique:

“Prostitution in Dubai is ruining the city’s reputation” (Alexis).

While functional, this approach to using a source is so minimal as to be almost ineffective. Note, for example, that the reader has not been told who "Alexis" is, what their credentials are, where this information has come from (and whether it is credible.)

However, look at the difference between that example and the next, paying close attention to the introduction of the source as well as the mention of the origin of the source material:

Shakar Alexis, a prominent sociologist, warns in Dubai News that “Prostitution in Dubai is ruining the city’s reputation” (Alexis).

In the second example, the student has introduced the speaker using their full name, has provided the reader with some idea of the speaker’s credentials, and has given the source of the speaker’s words. Finally, in the parentheses, the student has documented the source. Note also that the student has used an effective verb, "warn," to introduce and characterize the quotation.

Choosing your words and embedding useful information carefully provides readers with a richer, more complete experience.

Show Relationships between Ideas

Your writing should show your thinking forms a whole. That is, your thinking forms a coherent unified idea by using transitional words and phrases. These may be used between paragraphs, to show the big connections among the ideas in your writing, or between sentence, to show the train do thinking that leads you to connect one claim to the next.

This chart provides a useful reference for students looking for just the right word to show the relationship between two paragraphs’ or two sentences’ main ideas:

Transition words/phrases | Transition words, Transition words for ...

Sentence punctuation involves using commas, semicolons, colons, periods, parentheses, and dashes to coordinate sections of sentences (phrases and clauses) into coherent wholes.

An independent clause is one that can function on its own as a sentence: it has a subject and a verb. It looks like a complete sentence. When you put together independent clauses, you need to signal that coordination with some sort of punctuation.

Link independent clauses in four ways :

Comma plus conjunction : I wasn’t ready for school to start, but it started anyway
Semicolon : I wasn’t ready for school to start; it seemed like summer should have stretched on forever
Semicolon and transitional word/phrase : I wasn’t ready for school to start; however, the first day turned out to be enjoyable.
Colon : I wasn’t ready for school to start: time had sped past me all summer

Link items in a series with some sort of punctuation . You can use commas or semicolons depending on your intended effect:

Commas : We can look at the increased coral deaths, melting polar ice caps, and the gradual decline of biodiversity as evidence of climate change.
Semicolons : Resolving the climate problems will take increased attention from governments; stronger sanctions for violators; and a genuine realization that our species is in trouble.

Colons and dashes set off examples and explanations so that each one gets the proper attention from the reader:

Colons : It doesn’t get any easier than this: I can pass some of my classes just by doing the work.
Dashes : I can pass some of my classes just by doing the assignments—I guess that means I’d better schedule time for homework.

Use colons, dashes, and parentheses to set off the important information from the rest of the sentence:

Commas : Before we can tackle our serious problems, most importantly humanitarian crises in Darfur and the African continent, we have to admit that they exist.
Dashes : It doesn’t take much milk to make pancakes--just a cup or so will do it--but using skim milk instead of whole milk will reduce calories.
Parentheses : I know a lot about being a student (but I don't know much about how to get a job after this).
Punctuation Overview at Purdue
The Punctuation Guide
<< Previous: You the Writer
Next: Speaking and Writing English (when it isn’t your first language) >>
Last Updated: Jul 23, 2024 12:21 PM
URL: https://guides.stetson.edu/WritingGuideStetsonU

Have a question? Ask a librarian! Email [email protected]. Call or text 386-747-9028.

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Writing Is Recursive

Chris Blankenship

In a recent interview , Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and author of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century , was asked how he approaches the revision of his own writing. His answer? “Recursively and frequently.”

What does Pinker mean when he says “recursively,” though?

historical document in tight cursive with "We the People" at the top

You’re probably familiar with the root of the word: “cursive.” It’s the style of writing that you may have been taught in elementary school or that you’ve seen in historical documents like the Declaration of Independence or Constitution.

“Cursive” comes from the Latin word currere , meaning “to run.” Combine this meaning with the English prefix “re-” (to do again), and you have some clues for the meaning of “recursive.”

In modern English, recursion is used to describe a process that loops or “runs again” until a task is complete. It’s a term often used in computer science to indicate a program or piece of code that continues to run until certain conditions are met, such as a variable determined by the user of the program. The program would continue counting upwards—running—until it came to that variable.

So, what does recursion have to do with writing?

You’ve probably heard writing teachers talk about the idea of the “ writing process” before. In a nutshell, although writing always ends with the creation of a “product,” the process that leads to that product determines how effective the writing will be. It’s why a carefully thought-out essay tends to be better than one that’s written the night before the due date. It’s also why college writing teachers often emphasize the idea of process in their classes in addition to evaluating final products.

There are many ways to think about the writing process, but here’s one that my students have said makes sense to them. It involves five separate ways of thinking about a writing task:

Invention: Coming up with ideas.

This can include thinking about what you want to accomplish with your writing, who will be reading your writing and how to adapt to them, the genre you are writing in, your position on a topic, what you know about a topic already, etc. Invention can be as formal as brainstorm activities like mind mapping and as informal as thinking about your writing task over breakfast.

Research: Finding new information.

Even if you’re not writing a research paper, you still generally have to figure out new things to complete a writing task. This can include the traditional reading of books, articles, and websites to find information to cite in a paper, but it can also include just reading up on a topic to learn more about it, interviewing an expert, looking at examples of the genre that you’re using to figure out what its characteristics are, taking careful notes on a text that you’re analyzing, or anything else that helps you to learn something important for your writing.

Drafting: Creating the text.

This is the part that we’re all familiar with: putting words down on paper, writing introductions and conclusions, and creating cohesive paragraphs and clear sentences. But, beyond the words themselves, drafting can also include shaping the medium for your writing, such as creating an e-portfolio where your writing will be displayed. Writing includes making design choices, such as formatting, font and color use, including and positioning images, and citing sources appropriately.

Revision: Literally, seeing the text again.

I’m talking about the big ideas here: looking over what you’ve created to see if you’ve accomplished your purpose, that you’ve effectively considered your audience, that your text is cohesive and coherent, and that it does the things that other texts in that genre do.

Editing: Looking at the surface level of the text.

Editing sometimes gets lumped in with revision (or replaces it entirely). I think it’s helpful to consider them as two separate ways of thinking about a text. Editing involves thinking about the clarity of word choice and sentence structure, noticing spelling and grammatical errors, making sure that source citations meet the requirements of your citation style, and other such issues. Even if editing isn’t big-concept like revision is, it’s still a very important way of thinking about a writing task.

Now, you may be thinking, “Okay, that’s great and all, but it still doesn’t tell me what recursion has to do with writing.” Well, notice how I called these five ways of thinking rather than “steps” or “stages” of the writing process? That’s because of recursion.

In your previous writing experiences, you’ve probably thought about your writing in all of the ways listed above, even if you used different terms or organized the ideas differently. However, Nancy Sommers, a researcher in rhetoric and writing studies, has found [1] that student writers tend to think about the writing process in a simple, linear way that mimics speech:

arrows pointing from invention to research to drafting to revision to editing in a row

This process starts with thinking about the writing task and then moves through each part in order until, after editing, you’re finished. Even if you don’t do this every time, I’m betting that this linear process is probably familiar to you, especially if you just graduated high school.

On the other hand, Sommers also researched how experienced writers approach a writing task. She found that their writing process is different from that of student writers:

arrows connecting invention, research, drafting, revision and editing to each other in all directions

Unlike student writers, professional writers, like Steven Pinker, don’t view each part of the writing process as a step to be visited just once in a particular order. 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.

For example, a colleague and I wrote a chapter for a book on working conditions at colleges, a topic we’re interested in.

When we started, we had to come up with an idea for the text by talking through our experiences and deciding on a purpose for the text. [Invention]
Although we both knew something about the topic already, we read articles and talked to experts to learn more about it. [Research]
From that research, we decided that our original idea didn’t quite fit with the research that was out there already, so we made some changes to the big idea. [Invention]
After that, we sat down and, over several sessions on different days, created a draft of our text. [Drafting]
When we read through the text, we discovered that the order of the information didn’t make as much sense as we had first thought, so we moved around some paragraphs, making changes to those paragraphs to help the flow of the new order. [Revision]
After that, we sent the rough draft to the editors of the book for feedback. When we got the chapter back, the editors commented that our topic didn’t quite fit the theme of the book, so, using that feedback, we changed the focus of the ideas. [Invention]
Then we changed the text to reflect those new ideas. [Revision]
We also got feedback from peer reviewers who pointed out that one part of the text was a little confusing, so we had to learn more about the ideas in that section. [Research]
We changed the text to reflect that new understanding. [Revision and Editing]
After the editors were satisfied with those revisions, we proofread the article and sent it off for final approval. [Editing]

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. Cutting several paragraphs because you find that they don’t meet the purpose of the writing task, throwing out research sources and having to search for more, completely reorganizing a text, or even reconsidering the genre can be a lot of work. But if you’re willing to put aside the linear steps and view invention, research, drafting, revision, and editing as ways of thinking that can be revisited over and over again until you accomplish your goal, you will become a more successful writer.

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.

“Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” in College Composition and Communication 31.4, 378–88 ↵

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Resources for Writers: The Writing Process

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.

Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document. It includes thinking, taking notes, talking to others, brainstorming, outlining, and gathering information (e.g., interviewing people, researching in the library, assessing data).
Although prewriting is the first activity you engage in, generating ideas is an activity that occurs throughout the writing process.
Drafting occurs when you put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. Here you concentrate upon explaining and supporting your ideas fully. Here you also begin to connect your ideas. Regardless of how much thinking and planning you do, the process of putting your ideas in words changes them; often the very words you select evoke additional ideas or implications.
Don’t pay attention to such things as spelling at this stage.
This draft tends to be writer-centered: it is you telling yourself what you know and think about the topic.
Revision is the key to effective documents. Here you think more deeply about your readers’ needs and expectations. The document becomes reader-centered. How much support will each idea need to convince your readers? Which terms should be defined for these particular readers? Is your organization effective? Do readers need to know X before they can understand Y?
At this stage you also refine your prose, making each sentence as concise and accurate as possible. Make connections between ideas explicit and clear.
Check for such things as grammar, mechanics, and spelling. The last thing you should do before printing your document is to spell check it.
Don’t edit your writing until the other steps in the writing process are complete.

An Overview of the Writing Process

Defining the writing process.

People often think of writing in terms of its end product—the email, the report, the memo, essay, or research paper, all of which result from the time and effort spent in the act of writing. In this course, however, you will be introduced to writing as the recursive process of planning, drafting, and revising.

Writing is Recursive

You will focus as much on the process of writing as you will on its end product (the writing you normally submit for feedback or a grade). Recursive means circling back; and, more often than not, the writing process will have you running in circles. You might be in the middle of your draft when you realize you need to do more brainstorming, so you return to the planning stage. Even when you have finished a draft, you may find changes you want to make to an introduction. In truth, every writer must develop his or her own process for getting the writing done, but there are some basic strategies and techniques you can adapt to make your work a little easier, more fulfilling and effective.

Developing Your Writing Process

The final product of a piece of writing is undeniably important, but the emphasis of this course is on developing a writing process that works for you. Some of you may already know what strategies and techniques assist you in your writing. You may already be familiar with prewriting techniques, such as freewriting, clustering, and listing. You may already have a regular writing practice. But the rest of you may need to discover what works through trial and error. Developing individual strategies and techniques that promote painless and compelling writing can take some time. So, be patient.

A Writer’s Process: Ali Hale

Read and examine The Writing Process by Ali Hale. Think of this document as a framework for defining the process in distinct stages: Prewriting, Writing, Revising, Editing, and Publishing. You may already be familiar with these terms. You may recall from past experiences that some resources refer to prewriting as planning and some texts refer to writing as drafting.

What is important to grasp early on is that the act of writing is more than sitting down and writing something. Please avoid the “one and done” attitude, something instructors see all too often in undergraduate writing courses. Use Hale’s essay as your starting point for defining your own process.

A Writer’s Process: Anne Lamott

In the video below, Anne Lamott, a writer of both non-fiction and fiction works, as well as the instructional novel on writing Bird by Bird: Instructions on Writing , discusses her own journey as a writer, including the obstacles she has to overcome every time she sits down to begin her creative process. She will refer to terms such as “the down draft,” “the up draft,” and “the dental draft.”

As you watch, think about how her terms, “down draft,” “up draft,” “dental draft,” work with those presented by Hale’s The Writing Process . What does Lamott mean by these terms? Can you identify with her process or with the one Hale describes? How are they related?

Also, when viewing the interview, pay careful attention to the following timeframe: 11:23 to 27:27 minutes and make a list of tips and strategies you find particularly helpful. Think about how your own writing process fits with what Hale and Lamott have to say. Is yours similar? Different? Is there any new information you have learned that you did not know before exposure to these works?

Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : http://lumenlearning.com/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
Authored by : Daryl Smith O' Hare and Susan C. Hines. Provided by : Chadron State College. Project : Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative. License : CC BY: Attribution
Image: Computer and notebook. Located at : https://unsplash.com/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
A Conversation with Anne Lamott 2007. Provided by : University of California Television (UCTV). Located at : http://youtu.be/PhP5GmybvPM . License : All Rights Reserved . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

Writing Is Recursive

Christopher Blankenship

What does Pinker mean when he says “recursively,” though?

U.S. Constitution

So, what does recursion have to do with writing?

There are many ways to think about the writing process, but here’s one that my students have said makes sense to them. It involves five separate ways of thinking about a writing task:

Invention: Coming up with ideas.

Research: Finding new information.

Drafting: Creating the text.

Revision: Literally, seeing the text again.

Editing: Looking at the surface level of the text.

academic essay writing is a recursive process discuss

On the other hand, Sommers also researched how experienced writers approach a writing task. She found that their writing process is different from that of student writers:

For example, a colleague and I wrote a chapter for a book on working conditions at colleges, a topic we’re interested in.

When we started, we had to come up with an idea for the text by talking through our experiences and deciding on a purpose for the text. [Invention]
Although we both knew something about the topic already, we read articles and talked to experts to learn more about it. [Research]
From that research, we decided that our original idea didn’t quite fit with the research that was out there already, so we made some changes to the big idea. [Invention]
After that, we sat down and, over several sessions on different days, created a draft of our text. [Drafting]
When we read through the text, we discovered that the order of the information didn’t make as much sense as we had first thought, so we moved around some paragraphs, making changes to those paragraphs to help the flow of the new order. [Revision]
After that, we sent the rough draft to the editors of the book for feedback. When we got the chapter back, the editors commented that our topic didn’t quite fit the theme of the book, so, using that feedback, we changed the focus of the ideas. [Invention]
Then we changed the text to reflect those new ideas. [Revision]
We also got feedback from peer reviewers who pointed out that one part of the text was a little confusing, so we had to learn more about the ideas in that section. [Research]
We changed the text to reflect that new understanding. [Revision and Editing]
After the editors were satisfied with those revisions, we proofread the article and sent it off for final approval. [Editing]

Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” in College Composition and Communication 31.4, 378-88. ↵

The Writing Post

Exploring writing as a recursive process.

I used to think that the writing process was as simple as sitting down, typing out a short story or essay on my laptop, giving it a quick review, and then sending it off to a magazine. I did not acknowledge that writing is a recursive process. In my imagination, I pictured editors responding with messages like, “You’re a genius! Here’s $3 billion dollars! You’ve revolutionized the world of writing!” In reality, all I managed to do was irritate a slew of editors at literary magazines with my nonsense.

One of my early mistakes was failing to grasp a concrete, recursive writing process beneficial to me. Yes, “recursive” might sound like an expensive word, but it carries significant weight. This is especially clear when you are striving to establish an effective approach to writing. It’s about comprehending the steps a writer must take to be both productive and proficient.

What does Recursive Mean?

In simple terms, recursive means “repeating” a process. Though, in more academic lingo, recursive means to do something “several times in order to produces a particular result or effect” (Cambridge). That is to say, working through a particular project and then repeating stages of the project to perfect your end goal is an example of recursion.

Another way to look at this is that when engaging with a recursive process, you are going back to a “simpler” form of your project and creating a more technical version. As such, you are going back to a prior stage in order to make better. Recursive is repetition, but it’s also perfection. You aren’t simply repeating necessarily. You are also adding to the previous construct to make it shine a little brighter.

How is the writing process recursive?

Writing as a recursive process encompasses the writing process itself (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing). It allows you to revisit previous steps and jump around during a writing project because, as most approaches to academic writing will tell you, these processes flow into one another, creating fluidity between stages. For instance, you may need to return to your drafting stage to enhance your introduction with more refined language, even though you’re in the revising stage.

When we discuss writing as a recursive process, we’re talking about the repetition of the writing process, which can sometimes trap us in the space between the editing and revising stages, endlessly moving sentences around, correcting grammatical issues, and adding new ideas over and over. Yet, this is precisely what we do as writers to create polished, well-crafted work. Remember: reading and writing is a “ reciprocal ” process and therefore they go hand in hand together; thus, you should be reading and writing as recursion.

It’s one thing to say, “Writing is recursive!” and another to fully understand its implications. Recursive writing means that each step you take in your writing process feeds into other steps. For example, after drafting an essay, you’ll verify facts, and if you find errors, you’ll return to the draft to correct them. In other words, we repeat processes to refine our message.

We must remember that we will always jump between stages. Completing the draft doesn’t mean you’re done drafting, and finishing revising doesn’t guarantee every paragraph is in its ideal place. In essence, writing is rewriting. It’s perfectly acceptable to revisit old steps in the process, from prewriting to drafting to revision, and even to begin again when you feel it’s necessary.

As Nancy Hutchison, associate professor of English at Howard Community College, wisely advises, “Good academic writing takes time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there are many steps to writing well.” This advice holds true for various writing genres, whether it’s academic, fiction, content writing, or any other form. It reminds us that we’re not in a race to finish quickly. We’ve all submitted unfinished writing due to neglecting the revision process, and a key lesson is to remember your writing steps, take breaks, and know that it’s perfectly fine to revisit your writing process.

Works Cited

“Recursive.” Cambridge. Dictionary.Cambridge.org.

Hutchison, Nancy. “Recursive Writing Process.” ENGLISH 087 Academic Advanced Writing, Howard Community College, 24 Jan. 2020, pressbooks.howardcc.edu/engl087/chapter/writing-process-recursion/.

“Writing as a Process: Writing is Recursive.” Stetson University Writing Program. Web. URL: https://www.stetson.edu/other/writing-center/media/G_Part_3.pdf . Accessed: June 14, 2021.

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A Guide to English: The Writing Process

An Introduction to Rhetoric
Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
The Writing Process
Formatting and Citations
The Reference Collection
Searching for Books
Searching for Articles
Bibliographic Trace
Citation Management
Scholarly Associations
The English Language
Literary Form
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Periods and Movements in American Literature
Periods and Movements in Commonwealth Literatures
Thematic Genres and "Genre Fiction"
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Text Analysis / Distant Reading
Digital Stewardship
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GIS and Geospatial Data
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In this Section

Academic Writing: How It's Different
Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing

Below are some guidebooks aimed at students which give in depth advice on how to go through the multiple steps of the writing process . When we give ourselves time and treat writing as a multi-step process, rather than a task we have to get right in one go (the weekend before the paper is due, right?), we can allow our thoughts and research to more fully develop in the prewriting stage, we feel less inhibited in our initial drafting of the paper, and we recognize that revision has the power to reshape and refine our writing into a rhetorically superior text. Once the content is ready we engage in proofreading to ensure the text is free of errors and ready to appear before the world at the final stage of publishing .

Check out the boxes below for more discussion of each stage the writing process.

Pre-writing

Consider the assignment requirements.

Before doing anything else, look carefully at the instructions or requirements for the assignment you have to complete. Remember: You can produce an amazing piece of writing and still lose points if you do not follow the instructions or are missing required elements.

A rubric is a table that tells you what point values your professor is likely to assign if you perform at a particular level for each criterion . A criterion is an aspect of your paper your professor is indicating you are going to be graded on, with a description typically offered for what a perfect or high score would look like in terms of what your paper achieves.

If you bear in mind the assignment requirements and/or the rubric criteria through each stage of the writing process, you will make it more likely that your final paper will meet all the requirements and achieve a higher score.

Consider the Rhetorical Situation

Fulfilling your professor's expectations is not always so easy as checking a box, however. In college writing we are expected to engage with the genre norms of the scholarly discipline that we are taking a class in. The norms of writing an English paper will differ from the norms of writing a Political Science paper, and will be still more different from the norms of writing a paper for a Biology class.

That is why in order to position ourselves for the most success for the writing task in front of us, it is important to consider the rhetorical situation . The rhetorical situation consists of three main factors:

The message you want to deliver
The audience you want to deliver the message to
Your credibility as a person delivering that message

There is also a fourth factor which shapes the other three, that being the overall context of the situation. At the prewriting stage, you won't necessarily have each of these factors sorted out: that's the whole point of prewriting. Pre-writing is a process of discovery, but while you are exploring it helps to have a general sense of what it is you are looking for (or else you might miss it!)

While pre-writing, think about:

What is the topic I want to deliver a message about? Is my topic too broad or too narrow (which is in great part determined by ...)
Who is my audience? Have they heard this message before? Will it catch their attention? Will my topic strike them as too broad, or will it seem too obscure/narrow? Does my message engage with/address their prior knowledge and understanding about the topic? Does it approach the topic from a "fresh" perspective that the audience could get excited about?
How can I establish my own credibility to write about this topic? What can I do to demonstrate that I should be listened to when writing about this topic? (For example, how does the narrowness or broadness of my topic affect my credibility? How can I engage with and respond to other sources of information who do already have credibility with my audience?)

Developing a Search Strategy: Brainstorming, Concept Mapping, and KWHL

In the prewriting stage, we are trying to unearth both our own preexisting knowledge as well as knowledge we develop through our research. There are various techniques for getting our own knowledge out of our heads and into a form where we can readily go back to it, ranging from pure brainstorming by free-writing thoughts related to the topic, creating a concept or mind map which connects related concepts and allows you to consider what the relations are between the concepts, or using a graphic organizer like a KWHL chart, where you write what you Know (K), Want to Know (W), How You Will Find Out (H), and afterwards, What You Learned (L).

Bubble.us - (semi)free mindmapping tool
A Blank KWHL Chart - useful as a graphic organizer and for setting research objectives

Bear in mind however, that prewriting is a recursive process, meaning it is repetitive: unearthing your existing knowledge about concepts related to a topic will lead you to other sources in order to learn more about those concepts, which can in turn lead you to add more concepts to explore and understand in order to gain a fuller understanding of the topic. When prewriting, paradoxically, we expand before we contract: that is, first we want to expand our understanding, so that we can have sufficient context for the next stage of prewriting, where we narrow our topic in preparation for more focused research and writing.

Narrowing Your Topic

Because academic writing is a conversation, we try to both respond to what other scholars have said and contribute our own original ideas in return. One great strategy to ensure you are well-positioned to both respond and be original is to narrow your topic . When a topic is too large or too general, it becomes much harder to deal with all aspects of it in any reasonable depth. (Think about it: if a topic is broad enough that other people have written 200+ page books about it, it is probably too broad for your paper.)

One way to narrow a topic is to add qualifiers. Instead of covering all of [my topic], how about [my topic] + [a particular time period] OR [a particular situation] OR [a particular group of people]?

Each qualifier narrows the topic even further, and each time you narrow the topic, in all likelihood you also narrow the number of other scholars who have commented on specifically that topic + your chosen qualifiers at the length and depth that you can bring to it. (Fewer preexisting points of view means there is more space for *your point of view.*)

Gathering Sources

Consult the Academic Research tab of this guide to learn about using databases to search for articles, using the Gustavus Library catalog to search for books, and about how to use bibliographic trace techniques to understand the web of scholarly discussion and the keystone texts related to your topic.

As you gather sources and consult them, use critical reading techniques to preserve your thoughts and responses as these will help you come up with the thesis statement you will attempt to prove (and supporting arguments with which to prove it) when you next go to outline your paper.

Creating an Outline

Below you will find a sample outline for a paper taken from the class NDL 112 : Themes in Science Fiction Literature , showing one possible way to organize arguments within a paper. The instructions required students to use at least two primary texts (the short stories and novels that the class read) to prove an argument about how the treatment of a theme in science fiction literature differed across time periods, and why that matters. The outline strategically assigns specific paragraphs for each required element, making it more likely that the first draft at least addresses all required elements on the rubric.

The organization you choose for a given essay might be informed by a variety of factors, including chronology, the need to address a preliminary idea before applying it to a subsidiary idea, or aiming for an elliptical effect by first addressing and then returning to an idea once the elucidation of other ideas can shed a different light.

Regardless of what organization you choose, it is vital to have a clear thesis statement that asserts an original idea that you wish to prove. Without a clear, assertive, and original thesis, the remainder of the paper is undermined because readers cannot understand what it is you are marshaling all this additional information/verbiage to prove. Get the thesis right, however, and you have the makings of a strong essay.

Preview the supporting arguments you will make in your body paragraphs right after your thesis.

A good technique for writing a body paragraph is to begin each paragraph with an assertion (or topic sentence ) that in some way supports your thesis (which you will have previewed in the introduction), then use the remainder of the paragraph to explain and support that assertion, or engage in conversation with others who offer information that relates to or helps you back that assertion up. It is often an effective technique to close a supporting paragraph with a sentence that reconnects to or recontextualizes the supporting argument (which you have just proven) within the main thesis of the paper; alternately, the concluding sentence of a supporting paragraph could be used to transition to the next paragraph, which builds off the supporting arguments that you have just proved.

Introduction: Probably best to lead with the trope and theme you will be addressing. Maybe start with some colorful historical background about this idea: why is it interesting, what is its significance, what could we learn if we were to trace it over time? By the end of your introduction, you should have some kind of clear THESIS STATEMENT about how your theme has changed and what that says about the history and culture of SF in the times you are comparing.

1st body paragraph: Perhaps theorizing the theme? Defining the theme and previewing how the trope changes and influences it. (A good place to bring in SECONDARY SOURCES and engage in conversation with them.)

2nd body paragraph - SUMMARY of FIRST PRIMARY TEXT - maybe touch on its historical and social context, relationships with movements in the history of SF (this could be its own paragraph and a good place to bring in SECONDARY SOURCES)

3rd body paragraph - ANALYSIS of FIRST PRIMARY TEXT and the THEME you are tracing

4th body paragraph - SUMMARY of SECOND PRIMARY TEXT - maybe touch on its historical and social context, relationships with movements in the history of SF (this could be its own paragraph and a good place to bring in SECONDARY SOURCES)

5th body paragraph - ANALYSIS of SECOND PRIMARY TEXT and the THEME you are tracing

6th body paragraph - COMPARISON of FIRST PRIMARY TEXT to SECOND PRIMARY TEXT in terms of how they use the TROPE(S).

7th body paragraph - COMPARISON of FIRST PRIMARY TEXT to SECOND PRIMARY TEXT in terms of how their usage of the TROPE(S) convey similar or different themes.

8th body paragraph - Discussion of how the differences in these themes reflect social or cultural changes and/or different historical movements in the history of SF. (Another great place to bring in SECONDARY TEXTS.)

Conclusion - Tying everything together, explaining what the significance is, especially cool if you can bring it back to how you started.

During the Drafting stage, you use your outline and the ideas you developed during Prewriting and focus on getting the ideas on paper. A draft is not meant to be perfect, nor should you spend much energy at this stage on your grammar or style. Instead think of your first draft as though you are producing clay (or play-doh, if you prefer) which you will substantially reshape during the Revision stage, and then make perfectly presentable (in terms of grammar and style) only when you reach the Proofreading stage. In drafting, by contrast, we are doing something more elemental: we are fulsomely developing our ideas into a text, because only once we have that draft of text in front of us can we do more precise actions to it.

The Revision stage is the stage where our writing goes from the first words and sentences that came out of our heads when working from our outline to the best words and sentences that we can come up with to express what we were trying to say. Experienced writers understand that revision is the stage where the author has the most agency to take an okay-sounding text and turn it into a rhetorical tour de force .

Authors accomplish this by analyzing the text they produced at multiple levels, typically starting from the largest (the paragraph-level) and moving to smaller levels (the sentences, the phrase, individual words) as they go, asking themselves questions like, "Is this the best way to structure this (paragraph, sentence, phrase)? Is there a way that would be more persuasive to my audience?" By proceeding from largest to smallest, they ensure that at all levels of its structure, the text is as good as it can be.

Here are two books that provide additional guidance about the revision process:

❝ "The history of learning is a history of revision — of mastering knowledge in order to improve it." –Matthew Parfitt, Writing in Response

During the Proofreading stage, we let go of our concerns over content and focus strictly on ensuring our grammar and word usage is correct. This is the most narrow and nitpicky stage of the writing process, which is why it makes sense to leave it until after we have dealt with larger questions of form and content during the previous stages of our writing.

Useful resources for Proofreading include the relevant style guide for your course (e.g. the MLA Handbook, the APA Handbook, etc.) and their citation guidelines to ensure you are properly formatting your text and citations. (See the Formatting and Citations page of this section.)

In order to ensure your individual words are accurately expressing what you mean to say, it is helpful to consult usage guides like the ones found in the Modern Grammar & Usage box on the English Language section of this guide.

Here are couple more books with useful information about the proofreading process:

You may not realize it yet, but there are numerous venues and formats available for publishing your writing. Publishing allows other people to read your work and enables you to get recognized. There are different processes for getting published in a popular or a scholarly venue, and there are also more modalities for publishing your work than just as a research paper.

For publishing in a popular venue, consult the Getting Published box on the Creative Writing page of this guide.

For a list of just some of the literary journals you could submit to, consult the Literary Reviews available in print and online box on the Searching for Articles page, go to the website of a journal that seems appropriate for your topic and study their Submission Requirements .

Here are some books that present more information about publishing in a scholarly journal, as well as other possible publishing formats:

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Academic writing
A step-by-step guide to the writing process

The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Published on April 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Good academic writing requires effective planning, drafting, and revision.

The writing process looks different for everyone, but there are five basic steps that will help you structure your time when writing any kind of text.

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Step 1: prewriting, step 2: planning and outlining, step 3: writing a first draft, step 4: redrafting and revising, step 5: editing and proofreading, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the writing process.

Before you start writing, you need to decide exactly what you’ll write about and do the necessary research.

Coming up with a topic

If you have to come up with your own topic for an assignment, think of what you’ve covered in class— is there a particular area that intrigued, interested, or even confused you? Topics that left you with additional questions are perfect, as these are questions you can explore in your writing.

The scope depends on what type of text you’re writing—for example, an essay or a research paper will be less in-depth than a dissertation topic . Don’t pick anything too ambitious to cover within the word count, or too limited for you to find much to say.

Narrow down your idea to a specific argument or question. For example, an appropriate topic for an essay might be narrowed down like this:

Doing the research

Once you know your topic, it’s time to search for relevant sources and gather the information you need. This process varies according to your field of study and the scope of the assignment. It might involve:

Searching for primary and secondary sources .
Reading the relevant texts closely (e.g. for literary analysis ).
Collecting data using relevant research methods (e.g. experiments , interviews or surveys )

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to take plenty of notes while you do the research. Keep track of the titles, authors, publication dates, and relevant quotations from your sources; the data you gathered; and your initial analysis or interpretation of the questions you’re addressing.

Check for common mistakes

Use the best grammar checker available to check for common mistakes in your text.

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Especially in academic writing , it’s important to use a logical structure to convey information effectively. It’s far better to plan this out in advance than to try to work out your structure once you’ve already begun writing.

Creating an essay outline is a useful way to plan out your structure before you start writing. This should help you work out the main ideas you want to focus on and how you’ll organize them. The outline doesn’t have to be final—it’s okay if your structure changes throughout the writing process.

Use bullet points or numbering to make your structure clear at a glance. Even for a short text that won’t use headings, it’s useful to summarize what you’ll discuss in each paragraph.

An outline for a literary analysis essay might look something like this:

Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
Introduce the research question: How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
Answer the research question
Indicate areas for further study

Once you have a clear idea of your structure, it’s time to produce a full first draft.

This process can be quite non-linear. For example, it’s reasonable to begin writing with the main body of the text, saving the introduction for later once you have a clearer idea of the text you’re introducing.

To give structure to your writing, use your outline as a framework. Make sure that each paragraph has a clear central focus that relates to your overall argument.

Hover over the parts of the example, from a literary analysis essay on Mansfield Park , to see how a paragraph is constructed.

The character of Mrs. Norris provides another example of the performance of morals in Mansfield Park . Early in the novel, she is described in scathing terms as one who knows “how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing” (p. 7). This hypocrisy does not interfere with her self-conceit as “the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world” (p. 7). Mrs. Norris is strongly concerned with appearing charitable, but unwilling to make any personal sacrifices to accomplish this. Instead, she stage-manages the charitable actions of others, never acknowledging that her schemes do not put her own time or money on the line. In this way, Austen again shows us a character whose morally upright behavior is fundamentally a performance—for whom the goal of doing good is less important than the goal of seeming good.

When you move onto a different topic, start a new paragraph. Use appropriate transition words and phrases to show the connections between your ideas.

The goal at this stage is to get a draft completed, not to make everything perfect as you go along. Once you have a full draft in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of where improvement is needed.

Give yourself a first draft deadline that leaves you a reasonable length of time to revise, edit, and proofread before the final deadline. For a longer text like a dissertation, you and your supervisor might agree on deadlines for individual chapters.

Now it’s time to look critically at your first draft and find potential areas for improvement. Redrafting means substantially adding or removing content, while revising involves making changes to structure and reformulating arguments.

Evaluating the first draft

It can be difficult to look objectively at your own writing. Your perspective might be positively or negatively biased—especially if you try to assess your work shortly after finishing it.

It’s best to leave your work alone for at least a day or two after completing the first draft. Come back after a break to evaluate it with fresh eyes; you’ll spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

When evaluating your writing at this stage, you’re mainly looking for larger issues such as changes to your arguments or structure. Starting with bigger concerns saves you time—there’s no point perfecting the grammar of something you end up cutting out anyway.

Right now, you’re looking for:

Arguments that are unclear or illogical.
Areas where information would be better presented in a different order.
Passages where additional information or explanation is needed.
Passages that are irrelevant to your overall argument.

For example, in our paper on Mansfield Park , we might realize the argument would be stronger with more direct consideration of the protagonist Fanny Price, and decide to try to find space for this in paragraph IV.

For some assignments, you’ll receive feedback on your first draft from a supervisor or peer. Be sure to pay close attention to what they tell you, as their advice will usually give you a clearer sense of which aspects of your text need improvement.

Redrafting and revising

Once you’ve decided where changes are needed, make the big changes first, as these are likely to have knock-on effects on the rest. Depending on what your text needs, this step might involve:

Making changes to your overall argument.
Reordering the text.
Cutting parts of the text.
Adding new text.

You can go back and forth between writing, redrafting and revising several times until you have a final draft that you’re happy with.

Think about what changes you can realistically accomplish in the time you have. If you are running low on time, you don’t want to leave your text in a messy state halfway through redrafting, so make sure to prioritize the most important changes.

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Editing focuses on local concerns like clarity and sentence structure. Proofreading involves reading the text closely to remove typos and ensure stylistic consistency. You can check all your drafts and texts in minutes with an AI proofreader .

Editing for grammar and clarity

When editing, you want to ensure your text is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. You’re looking out for:

Grammatical errors.
Ambiguous phrasings.
Redundancy and repetition .

In your initial draft, it’s common to end up with a lot of sentences that are poorly formulated. Look critically at where your meaning could be conveyed in a more effective way or in fewer words, and watch out for common sentence structure mistakes like run-on sentences and sentence fragments:

Austen’s style is frequently humorous, her characters are often described as “witty.” Although this is less true of Mansfield Park .
Austen’s style is frequently humorous. Her characters are often described as “witty,” although this is less true of Mansfield Park .

To make your sentences run smoothly, you can always use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite them in a clearer way.

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

When proofreading, first look out for typos in your text:

Spelling errors.
Missing words.
Confused word choices .
Punctuation errors .
Missing or excess spaces.

Use a grammar checker , but be sure to do another manual check after. Read through your text line by line, watching out for problem areas highlighted by the software but also for any other issues it might have missed.

For example, in the following phrase we notice several errors:

Mary Crawfords character is a complicate one and her relationships with Fanny and Edmund undergoes several transformations through out the novel.
Mary Crawford’s character is a complicated one, and her relationships with both Fanny and Edmund undergo several transformations throughout the novel.

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

There are several issues in academic writing where you can choose between multiple different standards. For example:

Whether you use the serial comma .
Whether you use American or British spellings and punctuation (you can use a punctuation checker for this).
Where you use numerals vs. words for numbers.
How you capitalize your titles and headings.

Unless you’re given specific guidance on these issues, it’s your choice which standards you follow. The important thing is to consistently follow one standard for each issue. For example, don’t use a mixture of American and British spellings in your paper.

Additionally, you will probably be provided with specific guidelines for issues related to format (how your text is presented on the page) and citations (how you acknowledge your sources). Always follow these instructions carefully.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

Ad hominem fallacy
Post hoc fallacy
Appeal to authority fallacy
False cause fallacy
Sunk cost fallacy
Deep learning
Generative AI
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Revising, proofreading, and editing are different stages of the writing process .

Revising is making structural and logical changes to your text—reformulating arguments and reordering information.
Editing refers to making more local changes to things like sentence structure and phrasing to make sure your meaning is conveyed clearly and concisely.
Proofreading involves looking at the text closely, line by line, to spot any typos and issues with consistency and correct them.

Whether you’re publishing a blog, submitting a research paper , or even just writing an important email, there are a few techniques you can use to make sure it’s error-free:

Take a break : Set your work aside for at least a few hours so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
Proofread a printout : Staring at a screen for too long can cause fatigue – sit down with a pen and paper to check the final version.
Use digital shortcuts : Take note of any recurring mistakes (for example, misspelling a particular word, switching between US and UK English , or inconsistently capitalizing a term), and use Find and Replace to fix it throughout the document.

If you want to be confident that an important text is error-free, it might be worth choosing a professional proofreading service instead.

If you’ve gone over the word limit set for your assignment, shorten your sentences and cut repetition and redundancy during the editing process. If you use a lot of long quotes , consider shortening them to just the essentials.

If you need to remove a lot of words, you may have to cut certain passages. Remember that everything in the text should be there to support your argument; look for any information that’s not essential to your point and remove it.

To make this process easier and faster, you can use a paraphrasing tool . With this tool, you can rewrite your text to make it simpler and shorter. If that’s not enough, you can copy-paste your paraphrased text into the summarizer . This tool will distill your text to its core message.

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Jack Caulfield

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ENGL001: English Composition I

Research writing as a process.

Writing does not occur in a vacuum. That is to say, writing is a process that involves more than sitting down at a desk and plugging words into a computer. When we write, we brainstorm and prewrite, we draft, we ask for feedback, we revise, we ask for feedback again, and we revise some more.

The process is recursive, meaning that is ongoing and turns back on itself frequently. For example, you may have a great idea for an essay and begin by brainstorming. After a bit of brainstorming you realize your idea is too broad and needs to be narrowed down. Then you do some research into your newly narrowed topic. The research you find makes you go back again and change the way you stated your topic’s main idea. As you begin drafting you realize some of your research fits nicely, but other pieces of research are of no use and you need to go back and do more research. And so on...

Read the following chapter and answer the following questions: How does the process approach differ from the product approach? Which do you prefer when writing an essay? Do you find that you follow any of the steps in these chapters when writing essays? Which prewriting activity works best for you?

Introduction

"I work best under pressure." We all have probably heard this statement from someone trying to meet a late deadline. For writers this approach means sitting down to write a paper just hours before it is due, writing only one draft, and submitting it. Such writing is a race against the clock, and there is no time for revision. Writers who believe in this method often say that working fast somehow releases their creative juices and helps them to beat writer's block. Some even say they deliberately put a writing task off to the last minute choosing to race against the clock rather than to work on the assignment gradually and in steps.

Surely, most writers are busy people, and sometimes we feel that there is no time to develop a piece of writing over days or even weeks before it is due. Sometimes we procrastinate, believing that we can produce good quality work just before the deadline. But such a "fast and furious" approach to writing is much more than just a problem of time management or procrastination. While most of us can write something up quickly, will this be our best work and will the resulting paper do justice to our topic and to our audience?

Racing against the clock, are we giving ourselves enough time to let the meaning of our writing to mature, or do we commit to paper the first thoughts that come to mind simply because we don't have time to develop them? When we work under stress of an imminent deadline, we naturally focus on getting the product out, that text which we will submit for a grade or publication. We simply have to have something written down. As we concentrate on getting that something on paper, we forget to give ourselves the opportunity to develop our thoughts and ideas, to let our piece evolve in our minds. In other words, we neglect the writing process.

In this chapter, I explain how to approach writing as a process The process model of writing justifies and endorses an approach to composing as a sequence of thoughtful steps, or quite the opposite to the "work under pressure" model mentioned earlier. Writers who take the process approach treat their work as a sequence of necessary stages. They compose multiple drafts; the seek feedback on those drafts from other readers; the revise the meaning of their writing heavily based on that feedback and on their own evolving thinking about the piece they are working on.

In this chapter, we will explore the main features of the process approach to composing and what makes it radically different from the product one. We will discuss what the process model can help you accomplish as a researcher and a writer. If you are used to the product approach because it has, on some level, worked for you in the past, you may be skeptical towards the process theory.

In order to convince you otherwise, I have decided included in this chapter stories and interviews by students, many of whom were also making the transition from the product to the process approach for the first time as they worked on the research writing projects described in this chapter. These narratives by students are not always all-out-success conversion from product to process stories, nor do they need to be. Some of these writers struggle with trying to be process-oriented as they try to understand and apply this new way of composing.

Product and Process Theories of Writing

In order to become critical writers and researchers capable of adapting to various writing situations, we must know not only the "hows", but also the "whys" of the theories and methods we try to use. Therefore, let us begin with an overview of the differences between process and product-based writing. This will help us make informed decisions about our writing process and choose the best method for writing given our specific rhetorical situation.

Before we begin, though, I'd like to offer a disclaimer. While having a lot of time for writing, revising, and discussing your work with others if, of course, is good thing, there will be situations in every writer's career when producing one version of a text for an upcoming deadline is all we can do. Such product-based writing can be of high quality, and experienced writers know how to produce such high-quality writing.

Typically, they do that by carefully analyzing their rhetorical situation before and during the writing act. Such writers typically spend more time and effort planning and developing a piece in their mind than on paper. At the same time, process-oriented writing, which allows for multiple revisions, for "stepping back" and considering the text from multiple points of view, and for discussing your work with others, is likely to result in a better-developed message. As you gain experience with writing a variety of texts for a variety of rhetorical situations, you will discover which method, or combination of methods, work for you.

Product-Based Writing

Here, I would like to tell a story from my own writing career. Some years ago, before I became a writing teacher, I worked in a job that required me to write and publish a monthly newsletter that described and promoted the services we offered and try to establish a connection with our customer base.

Writing the newsletter seemed like an easy enough job. After all, I knew well what our organization did and, I thought that I could easily write several pages per week describing that to my readers. So, one afternoon I sat in front of the computer and tried to compose the first issue of our new publication. I had it all in my head: the contents, the style, even the layout of the final draft. I thought I had a vision for this thing, and I really wanted to do a good job with it.

And then, writer's block hit me. I just couldn't write that first sentence. I wrote the beginning of it and wasn't happy with it. So I deleted it and started over again. The next version was no better, so I deleted it, too. After about an hour, I realized that I was in trouble: I had written three sentences out of five or six pages that I had to produce. Even worse, the whole thing was due on my boss's desk the next afternoon.

So, where and how did I get into trouble with my assignment? I thought I knew perfectly well what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. My problem was trying to get every word and every sentence "just right" the first time I wrote them. I had a picture of the finished newsletter in my head, but I just didn't know how to get to that picture. Somewhere along the way, I became unable to translate my writing plans into words, sentences and pages. I focused too much on the product of my writing that I had envisioned but that did not yet exist. I was not thinking enough on the process of getting from a blank computer screen to the finished text.

Now I know that I followed the product model of composing that day. As its name suggests, the product approach forces the writer to concentrate on the finished text, or the product of writing, at the expense of the steps and stages necessary to arrive at that product. Finishing the piece quickly, efficiently and in one sitting is what counts. This desire to write everything perfectly the first time can demoralize and incapacitate the writer, especially an inexperienced one.

Here are some of the main features of product-based writing:

It assumes that writers produce texts in "one sitting", without revising or taking pauses in their work.
It forces the writer to "think before writing". Product-oriented writers must have a clear plan for writing in our heads before composing.
Producing only one draft forces them to settle for what came first, which may or may not be their best work.
In product-oriented writing, there is little or no opportunity for feedback from others.

When someone tells us to "think before we write", we are being asked to believe that meaning can be fully formed in our head before we commit it to paper. It is as if we were forced not only to construct the paper fully in our mind, but also to memorize it. According to the product approach, only then can we begin to write. If this is correct, then writing means only transcribing existing information, ideas, and opinions on to paper.

A writer who follows the product model gets only one opportunity to formulate and express his or her thoughts. Whatever meaning that writer has created in his or her head by thinking about the subject of his or her writing gets transferred on to paper or computer screen as the final version. The quality of such writing (as well as the quality of the ideas which gave birth to it) may be passable, but it is hardly the best this writer can do given the chance to develop and refine these ideas through multiple drafts.

Within the product model, a writer gets only one chance to "get it right". As my story about writing the newsletter illustrates, this can lead to writer's block, fear of the blank page or blank computer screen, or whatever else we can call that feeling of helplessness and despair which we face when a deadline is looming and we have not written anything. This feeling makes us rush, and rushing, in turn, produced bad writing.

Because there are no drafts and revisions in product-based writing, writers get little or no opportunity to ask others for feedback and suggestions to improve the writing. The first and only draft is what gets submitted, usually for a grade, and by that time, it is too late to work on improvements. The very first reader who sees the writing, be it a boss at work or a teacher at school, is its judge and jury. This very first reader of a piece grades it or evaluates it in some other way, returning the verdict to the writer. As you learned from the chapter of this book dedicated to rhetoric, composing is a highly social process and no writer works in a vacuum. Asking anyone to write without feedback and the chance to discuss their ideas and drafts clearly contradicts that.

Process-Based Writing

In order to learn to see writing as a process, it is first important to understand that the meaning of any text is created during the act of writing itself, not before. Here are some basic principles of process-based writing:

Writing is a process and practice. The meaning of any text is created and evolves during composing and revision.
In order to develop meaning fully, multiple drafts are necessary. Writing is much more than a transcription tool. It is a means of making knowledge, learning, and critical thinking.
The writing process can be divided into stages that include but are not limited to invention, revision, and editing.
Writing is a non-linear process, and its stages often overlap.
Writers actively seek feedback from readers and judiciously use that feedback in their revisions.
The process model empowers writers by encouraging them to understand and refine their writing strategies and techniques.

Most writers do not begin a new piece with a set meaning in their minds. We may have an initial idea for a piece of writing, but in order to implement that idea, we have to shape and re-shape it constantly as we write and re-write. The meaning if any text is an ever-evolving entity. Thinking does not precede writing, but happens simultaneously with writing. This shaping and re-shaping of the text's meaning takes place through drafting and revision. For example, I took every chapter in this book through several drafts before it was published. Some parts of this text were rewritten five or six times, as my own thinking about them changed and as I received feedback from reviewers.

Writing is a Non-Linear and Recursive Process

In Lewis Carroll's tale Alice in Wonderland, the following dialog takes place between the King and the White Rabbit. Alice is on trial, and the Rabbit believes that he has a letter that might prove her innocence. He asks the King to allow him to read the letter. After the King agrees, the Rabbit asks: "Where shall I begin, please, your Majesty?" And the King answers: "Begin at the beginning…. And go on till you come to the end: then stop".

Writing, of course, is not the same as reading, but writers who are used to the product-based approach to composing often work on their compositions in a manner similar to the one in which the Rabbit read his letter. As you recall, the product-based approach requires writers to "think before they write".

According to this theory, we have to plan and lay out our whole compositions in our heads before we can begin writing them down. Consequently, a writer who has the whole piece stored in his or her mind, can quite easily write it from the beginning through the middle and to the end. After all, according to this approach nothing should change in the content of the piece during the act of writing itself. According to the product theory, writing is a sequential and orderly process of transcription.

Having studied the process model, however, we know that the content of every piece of writing gets developed during composing and not before. Thus, when we are working on a paper, we are not merely committing to paper or computer screen some pre-determined and pre-planned ideas that existed in our heads before we began composing. Instead, we are formulating and refining those ideas as compose. Such an approach allows us to take care of the content of the piece before be begin to worry about its structure.

Writers who approach composing in a linear way tend to think about their pieces in terms of structure rather than content first. That is, before they even come up with enough to say, they, at least subconsciously, begin to worry about introduction, body, conclusion, and other structural elements of a text that does not yet exist. It is difficult for them to do otherwise because, if writing is linear (and in their minds it is), then you have to create the pieces of the future paper sequentially. According to this method, it is impossible to write the body of a text before the introduction. Similarly, within this framework, you cannot write a conclusion before the introduction is finished, and so on.

Writing is a non-linear and recursive process. This means that most writers do not "begin at the beginning" of a piece and "end at the end". Instead, composing takes places in chunks, with authors going back and forth between clusters of ideas and writing possibilities, constantly reviewing and revising them, and moving them between the various parts of the prospective text.

So, how might this non-linear approach to writing work in practical terms? To understand, consider one student's composing process.

Melissa Hull was a student in one of my first-year writing classes. One of the assignments in that class required her to find and study a text produced by some oppressed or under-represented ethnic or cultural group and to show how that group had, over time, adjusted its writing and its self-representation in order to survive in a society dominated by other cultures. Melissa decided to study texts produced by Arvanites, an ethnic and linguistic minority in Greece. Melissa's approach to the project is an excellent example of the recursive and non-linearity nature of writing. I interviewed Melissa to gain an insight into her research and writing processes. The following are summaries of parts of our conversation.

Pavel Zemliansky : Could you describe the early stages of the project? How did you begin to make sense of the assignment?

Melissa Hull : I started to take notes and jot down ideas before even finding any texts written by Arvanites. However, I did not want to get too far along into the project without showing it to someone first. I was worried that maybe I was doing something wrong.

Pavel Zemliansky : How did you start your research and why did you choose to write about Arvanites?

Melissa Hull : I did some searches of online databases on the library websites on marginalized cultures. At first, the assignment was a little confusing, though.

Pavel Zemliansky : Could you describe the writing of the first draft?

Melissa Hull : I did some searches and found a lot of materials about Arvanites but none by them. It appears that their language is almost dead, so there aren't many written texts by them. I found some texts on the web that said they were by Arvanites, but they were in Greek, so I could not go with them. I decided to start writing the draft just to make a better sense of the assignment and to go by what I had. I thought things would become clearer as I went. I ended up writing five drafts.

Pavel Zemliansky : I seem to remember that you struggled after you write the very first rough draft? What was difficult and how did you resolve the problems?

Melissa Hull : I knew absolutely nothing about them, but they seemed interesting and wanted to find out.

Pavel Zemliansky : Could you describe the differences between your first and following drafts?

Melissa Hull : After I wrote the first draft and received some feedback from my workshop group, I began to understand that I need a change of direction my approach because I was not going to be able to find enough texts by the Arvanites. So, I looked a bit broader and wondered if I could use other elements of their culture, such as architecture and crafts, as texts. I was also beginning to realize that the point of my paper could be that there weren't enough texts by the Arvanites and that facts showed something about their culture. So, my point of view on the subject changed as I kept writing drafts and researching.

As you can see from these excerpts, Melissa's plans and the direction in which her paper was going change as she conducted additional research, revised, and received responses from her classmates and instructor. She was creating meaning in and through the process of research and writing.

How does the non-linear and the non-sequential nature of the writing process affect you as a writer? It urges you to move away from thinking about your compositions in terms of an introduction, body, and conclusion, that is they are thinking in structural terms. Very often, when students discuss their writing plans with me, they say something like "and then, in this paragraph, I will have idea X. And then in the next paragraph, I will include story Y". Certainly, there comes a time in the writing process when a writer needs to revise for structure and coherence deciding how to organize paragraphs and sentences. But, in my experience, many student writers begin to worry about structure way too early, way before they have fully formed and developed their ideas for writing.

So, as you begin to write your next piece, I invite you to begin by thinking not about the structure of your yet unwritten text but about its content. You will create the structure later, once you know what kind of material you have for your writing. Your content will determine the structure of your paper, and you will generate that content not by going through some predetermined routine, but by working in a creative, non-linear, and non-sequential way.

Applying the Process Approach to Research Writing

The generic research paper assignment that most of us have been given in school often requires us to come up with a thesis, or position on the subject of our research before we begin researching. The crudest by widely spread example of this approach goes something like this: a student writer is asked to "defend" a position he or she strongly believes in and to "support" that position with researched evidence.

The assumption here is that the writer knows exactly what he she wants to say before the composing process begins. It is easy to see that, in this case, the purpose of research is to find the kinds of sources, proofs, and theories that confirm the writer's existing opinion. Thus, the definition of the term "research" itself is changed and searching for answers is replaced with a quick fix of facts, statistics, and quotes.

Suppose, for example, that you have been assigned to write a researched argument about the death penalty. Suppose also that you are against the death penalty and that, in your paper, you will try to "prove" that killing someone as a means of administering justice is morally wrong.

By the way, I think that arguing for or against the death penalty, abortion rights, and other similar controversial subject in a research project is very difficult because most people, including you, the writer, have set views on each of these subjects that cannot be changed. But, we will use the example of the death penalty argument anyway because it keeps popping up in traditional research papers.

Armed with the belief that death penalty is wrong, you go to the library or browse the Internet looking for "research" to support your thesis. Of course, because you already have your thesis, it is very tempting to look for and use only those sources that agree with you and to discard or overlook the others. If you are lucky, you find enough such sources and construct a paper that argues for the abolition of the death penalty. Ask yourself the following question, though: what have you found out or investigated during your research? Have you discovered new theories, opinions, or aspects of your subject? Did anything surprise you, intrigue you, or make you look further? If you answered no to these questions, you did not fulfill the purpose of true research, which is to explore, to discover, and to investigate.

The purpose of research is not to look for proofs that would fit the author's pre-existing theories, but to learn about the subject of the investigation as much as possible and then form those theories, opinions, and arguments on the basis of this newly found knowledge and understanding. And what if there is no data that prove your theory? What if, after hours and days of searching, you realize that there is nothing out there that would allow you to make the claim that you wanted to make?

Most likely, this will lead to frustration, a change of the paper's topic, and having to start all over again. Not only will this inconvenience you by making you to race against the clock to meet the deadline and to do lots more busywork than necessary, but it will also be a waste of time because you will not learn anything new. Even if you manage to create a neat and efficient paper, it will be false research, simply jumping through hoops in order to fulfill another meaningless school assignment.

So, should you begin every research project as a disinterested individual without opinions, ideas, and beliefs? Of course, not! There is nothing wrong about having opinions, ideas, and beliefs about your subject before beginning the research process. Good researchers and writers are passionate about their work and want to share their passion with the world. Moreover, pre-existing knowledge can be a powerful research-starter.

But what separates a true researcher from someone who simply looks for "proofs" for a pre-fabricated thesis is that a true researcher is willing to question those pre-existing beliefs and to take his or her understanding of the research topic well beyond what he or she knew at the outset. Speaking in terms of the process theory of writing, a good researcher and writer is willing to create new meaning, a new understanding of his or her subject through research and writing and based on the ideas and beliefs that he or she had entering the research project.

Writing Activity: Examining Past Writing Experiences

Remember a situation in which you chose or were forced to follow the product model, whether consciously or sub-consciously. Consider both school writing tasks and out-of-school ones. Working on your own or with a partner, jot down some answers to the following questions. After you finish, be sure to share your ideas with your classmates.

What was the assignment's purpose, audience, and how much time did you have to complete it?

Briefly describe your composing process. Talk about the amount of time you spent planning the piece in your head and the amount of time you spent writing it. Try to remember whether you had the opportunity to receive feedback from others before the assignment was due. If not, why?
If at any point in the assignment, you hit writer's block, what did you do about it? Did you have adequate time, resources, and writing techniques to overcome it?
Who read and evaluated your writing after it was completed? What criteria was the evaluation based on? Did you feel that you did a good job with the piece?

The Main Stages of the Writing Process

The word "process" itself implies doing things in stages and over time. Applied to writing, this means that as you proceed from the beginning of a writing project through its middle and towards the end, you go through certain definable stages, each of which needs to be completed in order for the whole project to succeed. Composing is very complex intellectual work consisting of many complex mental activities and processes. As we will see in the next section of this chapter, it is often difficult to say when and where one stage of the writing process ends and the next one begins. However, it is generally agreed that the writing process has at least three discreet stages: invention, revision, and editing.

In addition to inventing, revising, and editing, writers who follow the process approach also seek and receive feedback to their drafts from others. It is also important to understand that the writing process is recursive and non-linear. What this means is that a writer may finish initial invention, produce a draft, and then go back to generating more ideas, before revising the text he or she created.

Invention is what writers do before they produce a first complete draft of their piece. As its name suggests, invention helps writers to come up with material for writing. The process theory states that no writer should be expected to simply sit down and write a complete piece without some kind of preparatory work. The purpose of invention is to explore various directions in which the piece may go and to try different ways to develop material for writing. Note the words "explore" and "try" in the previous sentence. They suggest that not all the material generated during invention final, or even the first draft.

To a writer used to product-based composing, this may seem like a waste of time and energy. Why generate more ideas during invention than you can into the paper, they reason? Remember that your goal during invention is to explore various possibilities for your project. At this point, just about the most dangerous and counter-productive thing you can do as a writer is to "lock in" on one idea, thesis, type of evidence, or detail, and ignore all other possibilities. Such a limited approach is particularly dangerous when applied to research writing. A discussion of that follows in the section of this chapter which is dedicated to the application the process model to research writing. Below, I offer several invention, revision, and editing strategies and activities.

Invention Techniques

These invention strategies invite spontaneity and creativity. Feel free to adjust and modify them as you see fit. They will probably work best for you if you apply them to a specific writing project rather than try them out "for practice's sake". As you try them, don't worry about the shape or even content of your final draft. At this stage, you simply don't know what that draft is going to look like. You are creating its content as you invent. This is not a complete list of all possible invention strategies. Your teacher and classmates may be able to share other invention ideas with you.

Free-writing

As its name suggests, free writing encourages the writer to write freely and without worrying about the content or shape of the writing. When you free-write, your goal is to generate as much material on the page as possible, no matter what you say or how you say it.

Try to write for five, ten, or even 15 minutes without checking, censoring, or editing yourself in any way. You should not put your pen or pencil down, or stop typing on the computer, no matter what. If you run out of things to say, repeat "I have nothing to say" or something similar until the next idea pops into your head. Let your mind go, go with the flow, and don't worry about the end product. Your objective is to create as much text as possible. Don't even worry about finishing your sentences or separating your paragraphs. You are not writing a draft of your paper. Instead, you are producing raw material for that draft. Later on, you just might find a gem of an idea in that raw material which you can develop into a complete draft. Also don't worry if anyone will be able to read what you have written – most likely you will be the only reader of your text. If your teacher asks you to share your free writing with other students, you can explain what you have written to your group mates as you go along.

Brainstorming

When brainstorming, you list as quickly as possible all thoughts and ideas which are connected, however loosely, to the topic of your writing. As with free writing, you should not worry about the shape or structure of your writing. Your only concern should be to write as long a list of possibilities as you can. As you brainstorm, try not to focus your writing radar too narrowly, on a single aspect of your topic or a single question. The broader you cast your brainstorming net, the better because a large list of possibilities will give you a wealth of choices when time comes to compose your first draft. Your teacher may suggest how many items to have on your brainstorming list. I usually ask my students to come up with at least ten to twelve items in a five to ten minute long brainstorming session, more if possible.

Mind-Mapping

Mind-mapping, which is also known as webbing or clustering, invites you to create a visual representation of your writing topic or of the problem you are trying to solve through your writing and research. The usefulness of mind mapping as invention techniques has been recognized by professionals in many disciplines, with at least one software company designing a special computer program exclusively for creating elaborate mind maps.

Here is how mind-mapping works. Write your topic or questions in the middle of a blank page, or type it in the middle of a computer screen, and think about any other topics or subtopics related to this main topic or question. Then branch out of the center connecting the central idea of your mind map to the other ones. The result should like a spider's web. The figure is a mind-map I made for the first draft of the chapter of this book dedicated to rhetoric.

This invention strategy also asks the writer to create a visual representation of his or topic and is particularly useful for personal writing projects and memoirs. In such projects, memories and recollections, however vague and uncertain, are often starting points for writing. Instead of writing about your memories, this invention strategy invites you to draw them.

The advantage of this strategy is that it allows the writer not only to restore these memories in preparation for writing, but also to reflect upon them. As you know by now, one of the fundamental principles of the process approach to writing is that meaning is created as the writer develops the piece from draft to draft. Drawing elements of your future project may help you create such meaning. I am not particularly good at visual arts, so I will not subject you to looking at my drawings. Instead, I invite you to create your own.

Outlining can be a powerful invention tool because it allows writers to generate ideas and to organize them in a systematic manner. In a way, outlining is similar to mind mapping as it allows you to break down main ideas and points into smaller ones. The difference between mind maps and outlines is, of course, the fact that the former provides a visual representation of your topic while the latter gives you a more linear, textual one. If you like to organize your thoughts systematically as you compose, a good outline can be a useful resource when you begin drafting.

However, it is extremely important to observe two conditions when using outlining as your main invention strategy. The first is to treat your outline as a flexible plan for writing and nothing more. The key word is "flexible". Your outline is not a rigid set of points which you absolutely must cover in your paper, and the structure of your outline, with all its points and sub-points, does not predetermine the structure of your paper.

The second condition follows from the first. If, in the process of writing the paper, you realize that your current outline does not suit you anymore, change it or discard it. Do not follow it devotedly, trying to fit your writing into what your outline wants it to be. So, again, the outline is you flexible plan for writing, not a canon that you have to follow at all cost. It is hard for writers to create a "perfect" or complete outline before writing because the meaning of a piece takes shape during composing, not before. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know what you are going to say in your writing unless and until you begin to say it. Outlining may help you in planning your first draft, but it should not determine it.

Keeping a Journal or a Writer's Notebook

Keeping a journal or a writer's notebook is another powerful invention strategy. Keeping a writer's journal can work regardless of the genre you are working in. Journals and writer's notebooks are popular among writers of fiction and creative non-fiction. But they also have a huge potential for researching writers because keeping a journal allows you not only to record events and details, but also to reflect on them through writing. In the chapter of this book dedicated to researching in academic disciplines, I discuss one particular type of writing journal called the double-entry journal. If you decide to keep a journal or a writer's notebook as an invention strategy, keep in mind the following principles:

Write in your journal or notebook regularly.
Keep everything you write – you never know when you may need or want to use it in your writing.
Write about interesting events, observations, and thoughts.
Reflect on what you have written. Reflection allows you to make that leap from simple observation to making sense of what you have observed.
Frequently re-read your entries.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of reading as an invention strategy. As you can learn from the chapters on rhetoric and on reading, writing is a social process that never occurs in a vacuum. To get ideas for writing of your own, you need to be familiar with ideas of others. Reading is one of the best, if not the best way, to get such material. Reading is especially important for research writing. For a more in-depth discussion of the relationship between reading and writing and for specific activities designed to help you to use reading for writing, see Chapter 3 of this book dedicated to reading.

Examining your Current Knowledge

The best place to start looking for a research project topic is to examine your own interests, passions, and hobbies. What topics, events, people, or natural phenomena, or stories interest, concern you, or make you passionate? What have you always wanted to find out more about or explore in more depth? Looking into the storehouse of your knowledge and life experiences will allow you to choose a topic for your research project in which you are genuinely interested and in which you will, therefore, be willing to invest plenty of time, effort, and enthusiasm.

Simultaneously with being interesting and important to you, your research topic should, of course, interest your readers. As you have learned from the chapter on rhetoric, writers always write with a purpose and for a specific audience. Therefore, whatever topic you choose and whatever argument you will build about it through research should provoke response in your readers. And while almost any topic can be treated in an original and interesting way, simply choosing the topic that interests you, the writer, is not, in itself, a guarantee of success of your research project. Here is some advice on how to select a promising topic for your next research project.

As you think about possible topics for your paper, remember that writing is a conversation between you and your readers. Whatever subject you choose to explore and write about has to be something that is interesting and important to them as well as to you. Remember kairos, or the ability to "be in the right place at the right time, which we discussed in Chapter 1.

When Selecting Topics for Research, Consider the Following Factors:

Your existing knowledge about the topic;
What else you need or want to find out about the topic;
What questions about or aspects of the topic are important not only for you but for others around you;
Resources (libraries, internet access, primary research sources, and so on) available to you to conduct a high-quality investigation of your topic.

Read about and "around" various topics that interest you. As I argue later on in this chapter, reading is a powerful invention tool capable of teasing out subjects, questions, and ideas which would not have come to mind otherwise. Reading also allows you to find out what questions, problems, and ideas are circulating among your potential readers, thus enabling you to better and quicker enter the conversation with those readers through research and writing.

Writing Activity: Generating Topics

If you have an idea of the topic or issue you want to study, try asking the following questions:

Why do I care about this topic?
What do I already know or believe about this topic?
How did I receive my knowledge or beliefs (personal experiences, stories of others, reading, and so on)?
What do I want to find out about this topic?
Who else cares about or is affected by this topic? In what ways and why?
What do I know about the kinds of things that my potential readers might want to learn about it?
Where do my interests about the topic intersect with my readers' potential interests, and where they do not?

Which topic or topics has the most potential to interest not only you, the writer, but also your readers?

Designing Research Questions

Assuming that you were able to select the topic for your next research project, it is now time to design some research questions. Forming specific and relevant research questions will allow you to achieve three important goals:

Direct your research from the very beginning of the project
Keep your research focused and on track
Help you find relevant and interesting sources

Revision Methods

Revision is essential for quality writing and research.

At the heart of the process approach to writing is revision. When writers revise, they assess the strengths and weaknesses of what they have written so far and change the content of the text in an effort to make it more rhetorically effective and interesting for the readers as well as more satisfying for the writer. Again, I repeat, the changes have to be in the content of the writing. Merely making mechanical changes, such as eliminating grammatical errors is not revision. When writers revise, they re-see their message and their approach to the very subject of the piece. A writer committed to revision has no shortcuts around it. Through revision, the text is changed developed, expanded or made more concise, and so on.

Revising a text requires a certain a mindset. Authors who are committed to the idea of revision need to get rid of the popular perception that good writers create their works when struck by genius and in one sitting. They need to understand and get accustomed to the idea that writing is not a "one-shot" activity. It is not a timed contest where you only get one try. Win now or bust. Write one perfect draft or lose the competition. Do your best now, under pressure, or receive a bad grade. But any kind of writing is a creative process, and, like all processes, it implies stages. It allows the writer the opportunity to improve over time, to make changes, to read and re-read what has already been written, think about it, discuss it with others, and improve it.

When writing within the process model, you usually produce only one draft. Once you found your sources, wrote down their summaries on note cards, and gave some thought to ways of arranging your material, you get one chance to write a paper. Writers who approach research as a process constantly evaluate and re-evaluate what they have written and, based on those evaluations, decide how to proceed with their research and writing.

To illustrate how revision might work in a process-based research project, let us return to the example about the death penalty paper. Again, I realize that this example is not perfect, but it is worth using it because of its familiarity to most college students and for convenience's sake. A process-oriented writer is guided by the idea that once the first round of searches and the first draft are completed, the investigation is far from over. Such a writer has only begun to make his or her meaning and there is still much to be done.

As you experiment with the revision strategies below, remember that making changes to the content of your text is the essence of revision. As a writer, you should not get too attached to your current draft. Instead, you should be able to distance yourself from it, evaluate it as critically as possible, and re-imagine it in a new light. These revision techniques are designed to help you do just that.

Ask Focusing Questions

Focus in writing is the issue, or sub-topic that is at the center of a given text. For example, within a general subject, such as "surfing", many different foci are possible. One writer may choose to write about the history of surfing, while another might decide to create an instructional manual teaching the basic techniques of the sport. Yet another may want to write a personal narrative about memorable surfing experiences, and so on. A first draft of a text is not always focused because, in a first draft, most writers explore the possibilities their subject has to offer and test the various directions in which they can take their writing. Therefore, one of the tasks you may face after you write the first rough draft of your work is to revise it for focus.

Searching and (Re)Searching

This method is about not settling for the first set of research sources you found and look for other and better ones between the first and second draft. Because writing is a recursive process, when you begin a research writing project, you never really know what you will find. So, once you have created a first exploratory draft of the project, you will ideally have new questions about your topic. To answer those questions, try to search for new sources, even if that will mean replacing the sources you found previously. To test this technique, try the following writing activity.

Writing Activity: Gaining New Knowledge through Revision

After completing the first draft of your research project that is probably based on your preexisting knowledge about the subject and the first round of your searches, consider the following questions. Apply these questions to any research project you are currently working on. You can complete this activity on your own and with your own draft, or use these questions in a workshop group as a guide for discussion and responding.

During your first round of searches, what new information, ideas and opinions about your subject have you discovered?
Which of your research results were expected and which ones puzzled you, surprised you, and intrigued you and why?
How does your current understanding of your subject differ from the one you had before you began your research?
Look back at your original research questions. In the light of your new knowledge, can they be revised, clarified, or modified in any way?
What additional research do you need in order to answer these revised questions?
Do not commit to a fixed thesis or a fixed point of view at this point. You are still looking, still exploring.

This activity is an example of what Bruce Ballenger (2001) called "writing in the middle" (176). You are likely between the first and the second draft of a research project. You have completed an initial search, and now it is time to evaluate what you know and what else you need to find out. In terms of the process theory, you are well on your way of creating interesting and rhetorically meaning for yourself and for your readers. By researching, writing about your data, and constantly evaluating both your research data and your writing, you are creating that new and original system of beliefs about your subject which Doug Brent talks about and which I mentioned earlier.

Writing Activity: Asking Focusing Questions

In the following activity, work with a rough draft you have recently completed. You can complete this activity on your own and working with your own draft. You can also complete this task in a small workshop group and apply the questions below to your classmates' rough drafts. As you work through the tasks below, remember that your goal is to find focus of your writing and to narrow your subject down to a manageable research question or set of questions that you can then investigate in your piece. Work through the following tasks thoroughly. Take adequate notes and record your answers and ideas. If you are reading someone else's writing, be sure to discuss your findings with the author.

Read the draft carefully, several times if necessary.
As you read, underline or highlight words, sentences, ideas, or paragraphs that, for whatever reason, seem important or interesting.
What ideas, stories or arguments is the draft trying to convey or advance? Does it have a "center of gravity", a central or important point or idea? Perhaps it has several such centers, in which case you will want to take note of them all, as each can later become the paper's focus.
Which of the ideas, stories, or arguments in the draft are worth developing further and which ones can be discarded? Remember that these ideas and arguments must be interesting and important not only to the writer but also the potential readers of the paper.
Try to plan for the next draft keeping in mind the focus (or foci) that you found going through the preceding questions.
As a result of this activity, your piece may take a completely different direction from the one you originally envisioned. Therefore, radical changes in your draft will likely be necessary. You will probably need to rewrite and rearrange whole sections and paragraphs of the paper, add new details, examples, and arguments while discarding some of the old ones.

Writing Activity: "Fat" Draft and Writing between the Lines

I learned these two revision techniques from my mentor and friend Wendy Bishop. Since then, I have used them many times both in my own writing and in my teaching.

In the "fat" draft activity, you are asked to double the length of your current draft. It does not matter where in the draft you add the material as long as the next version of your text is twice as long as the previous one. It does not even matter all that much whether the sentences and paragraphs you are adding are good enough to stay in final version of your paper. Remember that you are making meaning as you revise, and it is important to generate as many options and ideas as possible in the process of revision.

In "Writing between the Lines", you are also required to double the length of your current draft, except here you add a new like underneath every existing one. Computers make this kind of text manipulation easy. The content of every new line you add will, in some way, be related to the line that precedes it. The lines do not need to dovetail into one another smoothly, and the transitions between them do not have to be seamless. Although the organizational decisions you will make about your paper later on may be influenced by what you write now, your primary concern should not be the structure of your paper or transitions between paragraphs and sentences. Instead, you should focus on generating as much material as possible by adding explanations, details, new research, descriptions, and so on.

Writing Activity: Searching in the Middle

This activity will work best if completed between the first and the second drafts of a research project. As in previous exploratory tasks of this chapter, you can apply the questions below to any research project you are currently working on. And, as with previous activities, you can either apply these questions to your own draft or to the drafts of others in a small workshop group. As you work on the questions below, use the notes that you took about your first draft during the previous exploration activity.

Review your first draft. Get an idea of what it is saying, but try not to look at it as a sum of introduction, body, and conclusion. Instead, evaluate the ideas and concepts presented in it and try to decide how well they answer your research questions.
Try to make some plans for revision. Use the revision strategies and techniques discussed earlier in this chapter as well as feedback from other readers.
Now review the research results that you obtained during the first round of searching. What do they do and not do to answer your questions? Revisit your research questions and try to revise them. Next, go back to the library and the Internet and conduct another round of searching, guided by your current, post-first draft vision of your topic and of your project.

Writing Activity: Cut and Paste

Here is another activity invented by Peter Elbow. When I assign this activity to my students, some of them consider it a little unusual at first, but eventually most of them see its usefulness. The purpose of the cut and paste activity is to radically re-see and re-imagine your draft by rearranging and rewriting its paragraphs. This activity works on the assumption that in order to radically re-imagine and revise their work, writers need to detach themselves as much as possible from the draft in its current form. In order to see your paper in a new light, you need to try to forget what it looks like now.

Elbow's cut and paste technique is likely to help you revise on two levels. It will probably help you focus your writing better by showing which parts of your draft belong there and which ones need to be discarded or rewritten. But it may also help you to revise for development and detail by highlighting those parts of your paper which need additional explanations, descriptions, scenes, stories, and so on.

With a pair of scissors, cut your draft into paragraphs. In my experience and that of my students, printing and cutting the paper works better than manipulating the paragraphs on the computer screen because it seems to allow the writer to remove him or herself better from the current form of the text.
Lay the paragraphs out on a table in front of you. Make two piles: in one pile, put the paragraphs which seem to fit in with the focus of your paper the way you currently see that focus. Put all the other paragraphs in the other pile.
Begin working with the second pile by reading through the paragraphs. Try to decide which of them can be rewritten and improved and which ones can be discarded. Don't be afraid to get rid of the material that does not fit into your design for the paper.
Now, consider the first pile and decide whether any of the paragraphs in it should be re-written.
Combine both piles. Try to create a new version (or several versions) of your text by arranging and re-arranging the paragraphs in several different ways. Remember that you will be revising most, if not all of them.
Notice what is missing in this new version. Do you need to add new arguments, details, descriptions, scenes, and so on?

Completing this activity will not produce a finished next draft for you, but it will help you to make some firm and realistic plans for it. Of course, because you have substantially re-seen and re-imagined your first draft, you will have to do write some new material to add to the existing paragraphs and complete the next draft.

Seeking Feedback from Others and Using It for Revision

Because writing is a social process, it is impossible to compose without getting feedback on your work in progress. The comments and questions you receive from your readers in the process of writing a paper will help you revise and improve your writing. They will also help you to fine tune your writing to your readers' needs and expectations. This is why writers must to actively seek others' feedback on their writing and to use that feedback critically in their revisions.

Basic Principles of Peer Response

A large part of a successful peer response process is the mindset of the participants. Your goal as a writer seeking feedback should be to engage others, your readers, in a conversation about your ideas and your text. Tell your readers about the kinds of problems you are experiencing with the writing and about the questions you have.

As a reader of the writing by others, your goal should be not to criticize, dismantle, and destroy their draft. Your goal is not to fix their grammar mistakes or proofread their paper for them. Instead, your strategic goal as a reader and responder is to help them to take their texts where they, not you, want it to go by giving constructive, thoughtful, and detailed feedback. One of the most accessible guides to peer response for writers has been written by Richard Straub in the essay "Responding--Really Responding – to Other Students' Writing". Straub states:

First, don't set out to seek and destroy all errors and problems in the writing. You are not an editor. You are not a teacher. You are not a cruise missile. And don't rewrite any parts of the paper. You are not the writer; you are a reader – one of many. The paper is not yours; it's the writer's (137).

He recommends the following principles of peer response:

Play back what you read in the paper to the writer. Ask the writer if the meaning you are getting is the meaning he or she intended.
Do not take on too much. Select one or two global (or content) problems in the piece and work in them.
Do not worry about grammar and spelling unless it is an editing workshop.
Comment in writing. Take notes on the margins and write summative notes at the end of the paper.
Be polite, but not too polite. If you see a problem in the writing, let the writer know.
Balance praise and criticism.

Good peer responding strategies and techniques are learned through practice. Neither your teacher nor I will expect you to become an excellent and experienced responder to writing overnight. Use the principles above to begin your learning.

Editing and Proofreading

Any written text can be changed and improved almost indefinitely. However, there comes a time in every writing project when the writer has to polish up the final product by editing and proofreading it. What editing strategies you will choose to employ will depend on the kind of style you want your writing to have. If you want terse and compact language, you will edit for conciseness. If you want an elaborate style, you will want to make sure that every sentence and every phrase is clear and says what you want it to say. In either case, editing is a rhetorical task, and the choice of writing style depends on your rhetorical purpose, the audience for which you are writing, and the context in which you are writing. Becoming a good editor of your own and others' texts takes a lot of practice.

Reading the Paper Backwards

Start reading the paper from the last sentence on the last page. Doing this forces you to pay attention to the mechanics of every sentence and word. By the time when you proofread your paper, you have probably finished revising it, and your main concern now is to make it as error-free as possible.

Reading to the Wall

Sit or stand facing a wall in the classroom or at home. Shut out the outside world. Now, read the paper out loud to yourself, slowly and deliberately. Pay attention to separate words, phrases, and sentences.

I hope that this chapter has given you a foundational understanding of process approach to writing and shown you how to apply the process theory to your writing and research. This chapter will be of any use to you only if you apply the knowledge and writing techniques explained here to your own research projects, whether from this book or from elsewhere. It is not meant to be read as an abstract work that will indoctrinate you in some inapplicable theory. Instead, I invite you to use and test everything you have read about in this chapter for your own writing. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the process approach to composing that sets it apart from its product counterpart is the way in which the process model empowers writers. Instead of directing writers towards some set of rigid and inflexible rules about writing, the process theory encourages us become aware of the approaches, strategies, and techniques work best for us. As with any theory, following the process model of writing means adhering to certain guidelines and principles. However, within those principles the process theory allows writers considerable flexibility and independence.

Ballenger, Bruce. 2003. The Curious Researcher. 4th ed Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Caroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Signet Classics, 2000.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press USA, 1998. Hull, Melissa. Personal Interview. 2004.

Recursivity in source-based writing: a process analysis

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Published: 26 October 2023

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Christian Tarchi ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4013-4794 1 ,
Ruth Villalón 2 ,
Nina Vandermeulen 3 ,
Lidia Casado-Ledesma 1 &
Anna Paola Fallaci 1

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In university settings, writing argumentative essays from reading conflicting source texts is a common task for students. In performing this synthesis task, they must deal with conflicting claims about a controversial issue as they develop their own positions. Argumentative synthesis is characterized by writers’ back-and-forth moves between reading source texts and writing their own texts—a self-regulatory process that can be termed recursivity. The present study investigated the recursive behavior of Italian university students as they wrote argumentative syntheses while reading conflicting sources. The 43 graduate students participating in the study read four source texts on a controversial topic, evaluation in academe, with the goal of writing an argumentative essay. Reading of the sources was studied through a think-aloud procedure, and recursivity in writing the syntheses was recorded through Inputlog software. Comparisons were made between 22 high-recursive and 22 low recursive writers for the quality of their argumentative essays and for the critical strategies that they had used in reading the sources. Descriptive and nonparametic analyses produced the following three findings: (1) The strategies most employed in prereading were all related to synthesis-related activities: voicing opinion, expressing agreement, and expressing doubts. (2) Recursivity occurred most often in the middle of the synthesis process, as writers developed their arguments, instead of at the beginning or end. (3) High-recursive writers surpassed low-recursive writers by producing argumentative essays of higher quality and obtained better recall scores. They also employed more critical processing relevant to synthesis when reading the sources. This study provides insight on how recursivity is involved in argumentative writing but still there is need for further research.

How to improve argumentative syntheses written by undergraduates using guides and instructional rubrics

Examining the value of a scaffolded critique framework to promote argumentative and explanatory writings within an argument-based inquiry approach.

Collaborative writing of argumentative syntheses by low-performing undergraduate writers: explicit instruction and practice

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Composing texts based on the reading of multiple sources, commonly known as synthesis writing, has piqued the curiosity of the educational and scientific community in recent times. This heightened interest can be attributed to both its frequent requirement across various educational levels (Marttunen & Kiili, 2022 ) and the cognitive challenges it poses for students. Studies in the field of synthesis writing have highlighted the significant learning opportunities inherent in this type of task. The process of reading, rereading, integrating, organizing, and extending diverse source texts requires a profound transformation of knowledge (Solé et al., 2013 ; Spivey & King, 1989 ). However, it is not surprising that for students tackling these activities poses a significant challenge, given the high cognitive demands involved (Mateos et al., 2018 ; Solé et al., 2013 ). Students are often faced with multiple-text comprehension tasks with the goal of producing an argumentative essay. When this learning situation occurs, students have to generate a particular type of argumentative writing: an argumentative synthesis (Mateos et al., 2018 ). Argumentative synthesis is a hybrid task that implies the critical use of reading and writing. Indeed, when synthesizing texts, writers comprehend such sources and write an essay based on the information read, returning to source texts for further comprehension if necessary. Producing a synthesis requires students to read and reread the texts (Nelson, 2008 ; Vandermeulen et al., 2020c ), both to identify relevant information and to elaborate and integrate it into the writing; i.e., synthesis writing is closely related to the recursion process.

Recursivity, which means returning to and repeating a procedure, has become a focus of research in synthesis writing since this is a central cognitive process in this type of activities (Nelson & King, 2023 ; Solé et al., 2013 ). The concept of recursion is widely known in the field of writing research. This recognition dates back to Emig’s pioneering study in 1971 (Emig, 1971 ), which demonstrated that the writing process does not follow a strict, linear sequence comprising only the planning, writing, and revision phases. Rather, writers follow a recursive pattern, repeatedly returning to subprocesses such as planning or revision at different points in the composition process (Flower & Hayes, 1981 ; Perl, 1980 ). However, for research on writing from sources, the term recursion is used differently.

In the field of writing from sources, recursivity involves an iterative process of “back and forth” between the reading of sources and the writing itself (Vandermeulen et al., 2023 ). It is a self-regulatory cognitive process which makes it possible to monitor the writer’s behavior, in order to introduce the relevant changes in the planning, textualization and evaluation phases (Mateos et al., 2018 ; Segev-Miller, 2007 ). Throughout the writing process, authors constantly revisit and reassess their ideas, arguments, and language choices, seeking coherence and effectiveness. This iterative process allows them to identify weaknesses, address inconsistencies, and refine their communication.

Despite the importance of recursivity in critical reading and writing, to date the studies focusing on this behavior are extremely scarce. In this study we aim to contribute to the literature on argumentative synthesis by investigating the relevance of recursivity and its interplay with critical reading processes.

Source-based writing

Writing activities in the academic context can take many forms. Students may be asked to write opinion essays on specific content, scientific reports, summaries of book chapters, etc. One task that stands out for its frequency and the difficulty it entails for students is source-based writing. Source-based writing requires the writer to read different sources and to synthesize information from them in response to an objective; for example, to develop a comprehensive view of a controversial topic (Braine, 1995 ; Weston-Sementelli et al., 2018 ). To adequately develop these writing tasks, students not only have to master different writing skills, but they also have to be proficient in reading and comprehending the different sources provided. Composing a high-quality text based on reading sources depends on both reading and writing skills and, therefore, there is an overlap between the processes of comprehension and language production (Spivey, 1990 ). This interdependence between the reading and writing processes (Graham et al., 2020 ) requires reading effectively in order to identify relevant information for the composition process and, in relation to the writing process, knowing how to incorporate this material into the text being created (Hirvela, 2004 ).

Argumentative synthesis writing

Synthesis writing is a type of source-based writing (Vandermeulen et al., 2023 ) and, therefore, it is a hybrid task (Spivey & King, 1989 ) that requires the combined use of reading and writing. Regarding reading processes, students need to evaluate the trustworthiness and relevance of the source-texts, identify the main perspective, identify and evaluate the strength of the main arguments (and counter-arguments), monitor their own comprehension and connect the new information with their prior knowledge and experiences. In other words, students need to read strategically. In addition, and because they are reading different sources, students need to perform the same actions across texts, to identify whether they hold compatible or opposing perspectives, and the extent to which they overlap in information provided and arguments discussed. Regarding writing processes, students need to plan, compose and revise (Hayes, 2012 ). In short, synthesis writing is an epistemic and a complex task (Segev-Miller, 2004 ) that requires the implementation of processes of selection, organization and connection of information related to different sources (Spivey, 1997 ), as well as intratextual (within one text) and intertextual integration (between two or more sources) processes in order to write a document with an original structure and content (Segev-Miller, 2007 ). To do so, a reader should consult the sources while writing his/her own text.

One aspect to take into account is that syntheses can be elaborated from sources that present complementary or conflicting information on a topic. Writing a synthesis from sources that present conflicting information can be understood as a particular type of argumentative writing, since it is necessary to consider the arguments and counterarguments related to the different perspectives (Mateos et al., 2018 ).

Addressing alternative perspectives on the controversial issue is critical to effective argumentation in argumentative synthesis writing; activities which are becoming increasingly important in the education of elementary and secondary students (e.g., De la Paz & Felton, 2010 ), as well as college students (e.g., Granado-Peinado et al., 2019 ; Luna et al., 2023 ; Mateos et al., 2018 ). In arguing personal opinion on a particular topic, different strategies can be implemented. A rebuttal strategy may be employed in case the arguments corresponding to the undefended position are considered erroneous or insufficiently justified. Another strategy may be to support one of the perspectives after assessing and weighing the arguments linked to the two positions. writers can point out the strengths and weaknesses of alternative perspectives and also refute positions and assertions with which they disagree (Reznitskaya et al., 2009 ; Toulmin, 1958 ). However, the emphasis can also be placed on intertextual integration processes when reading texts that address conflicting topics. In this regard, although rebuttal and weighing are well-recognized strategies in argumentation, Nussbaum and Schraw ( 2007 ) added another strategy in their theoretical framework concerning the integration of arguments and counterarguments: compromise/conciliation between alternative views. In this last strategy defined, the writer tries to propose a conciliatory solution that brings together the positive aspects of the two opposing positions. Importantly, even though all strategies described by Nussbaum and Schraw are employed in synthesizing, the authors use the term “synthesis” for one specific strategy: the development of a “conciliatory solution” to the problem being addressed. Moreover, Nussbaum and Schraw use the terms “argument” and “counterargument” for what many writing researchers would call “claim” and “counterclaim,” while defining the term “argument” as a full argumentative text.

A rebuttal strategy may be employed in case the arguments corresponding to the undefended position are considered erroneous or insufficiently justified. Another strategy may be to support one of the perspectives after assessing and weighing the arguments linked to the two positions. The third and last strategy defined by these authors would be the strategy of synthesis, in which the writer tries to propose a conciliatory solution that brings together the positive aspects of the two opposing positions. Importantly, even though all strategies described by Nussbaum and Schraw are employed in synthesizing, the authors use the term “synthesis” for one specific strategy: the development of a “conciliatory solution” to the problem being addressed. Moreover, Nussbaum and Schraw use the terms “argument” and “counterargument” for what many writing researchers would call “claim” and “counterclaim,” while defining the term “argument” as a full argumentative text. Furthermore, it is worth noting that while Nussbaum and Schraw refer to a synthesis strategy, it could also be called “compromise/conciliation between alternative views”. However, in the field of research on argumentative synthesis writing from multiple sources, the term “synthesis” is commonly used to refer to this specific procedure.

Several studies have been conducted in the field of argumentative synthesis writing from sources with conflicting information (e.g., Casado-Ledesma et al., 2021 ; Granado-Peinado et al., 2023 ; Luna et al., 2023 ; Mateos et al., 2018 ). All these studies share a common feature, which is the design and implementation of intervention programs aimed at enhancing students’ competence in writing argumentative syntheses. In doing so, they all draw upon the theoretical framework of Nussbaum and Schraw regarding strategies for integrating arguments and counterarguments. With regard to our research, an argumentative synthesis writing task was implemented, that is, participants were asked to express an opinion on a topic and support it with the arguments and counter-arguments identified in the texts. Being that, our analytical approach also drew upon Nussbaum and Schraw’s proposal regarding intertextual integration strategies. Besides, we adopted two process-tracing approaches: think-aloud procedures (Afflerbach & Cho, 2009 ) learn about reading strategies employed when writers read source texts after being informed that they will soon write argumentative texts from conflicting sources, and input logs (Leijten & Van Waes, 2013 ) to learn about recursivity during writing. We also used two product-oriented measures: text evaluation of the argumentative syntheses, with major attention to intertextual integration as in past studies in the field (Casado-Ledesma et al., 2021 ; Granado-Peinado et al., 2023 ; Luna et al., 2023 ; Mateos et al., 2018 ) and a delayed recall measure for addressing deep comprehension.

Recursivity in source-based writing

Recursivity when writing has received some attention from research. By recursivity we refer to the number of switches between sources and the writer’s text document. Writers may go back to sources at different stages of the writing processes, namely when planning, composing or revising. Weak writers tend to follow a linear process, from reading to writing, which in turn produces low-quality texts (Fidalgo et al., 2014 ). Strong writers go back and forth from sources to their own text several times for, hypothetically, strategic reasons (Mateos & Solé, 2009 ; Solé et al., 2013 ).

The relevance of recursivity when writing is grounded in the levels-of-processing theoretical framework (Craik, 2002 ; Craik & Lockhart, 1972 ). According to this theory, people process information at different levels of depth, which are generally not processed linearly. Rather, people re-circulate information in their memory to further analyze it. Of course, this process depends on the quality of the working memory: the trace may get lost once people proceed to process different information. The repeated presentation of stimuli could support this process. Thus, recursivity exposes learners over and over again to the same information, which can be processed at different levels.

Past studies have investigated whether recursivity is associated with argumentative synthesis writing. Mateos and Solé ( 2009 ) analyzed the written products of students from different educational levels who had received a synthesis task from their teachers. They found that older students (university level) implemented more often a recursive rather than linear approach to the task than younger students. This finding was partially confirmed by Vandermeulen et al.’s study ( 2020d ), showing that higher grade students switched more frequently between sources and their own text, at least in the beginning of the writing process. Moreover, the studies of Solé et al. ( 2013 ), with secondary students, and Du and List ( 2020 ), with undergraduate students, also support the idea that better quality products are related to more recursive patterns while reading multiple texts. Vandermeulen et al. ( 2020c ) studied source use in upper-secondary students’ argumentative and informative source-based writing. Results showed that recursion was most frequent in the middle part of the writing process (as compared to the beginning and end phase), and that students switched to the sources more frequently when writing an argumentative text than when writing a narrative text. Additionally, these authors related source use to the quality of the text. A positive correlation between recursivity in the first phase of the process and text quality was found, while recursivity in the last phase of the process correlated negatively with text quality.

Process analysis in reading and writing

Most research on reading and writing has almost exclusively focused on the products of these activities (e.g., reading comprehension, recall, written text quality, coherence, and the like). At the same time, several scholars have turned their attention towards reading and writing processes, developing research methodologies able to provide us an insight into the students’ metacognitive activity.

The think-aloud methodology has been used to address reading in writing from sources (Du & List, 2020 ; Mateos et al., 2018 ; Solé et al., 2013 ). This methodology helps researchers to identify cognitive and metacognitive processes implemented during a learning task (Ericsson & Simon, 1998 ; Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995 ). When performing a task, such as reading one or more texts, participants are asked to “think aloud”, that is to voice any thought they have while reading, without filtering any thought. Thinking aloud while performing a task, rather than before (prospective think-aloud) or after (retrospective think-aloud) is considerate preferable as it addresses two limitations of these options, respectively people do not do what they say they do and people do not always recall accurately what they have done (Hu & Gao, 2017 ). Moreover, it provides direct access to reading processes, whereas other techniques, such as log-data or eye-tracking, indirectly infer metacognitive processes from behavior. Recent studies have demonstrated the substantial neutrality of think-aloud on target processes (Bannert & Mengelkamp, 2008 ; Tarchi, 2021 ).

One way to access cognitive and metacognitive processes such as recursivity during writing is through the use of keystroke logging tools such as Inputlog (Leijten & Van Waes, 2013 ). Inputlog makes it possible to observe the writing process unobtrusively as it runs in the background of a familiar word processor. Inputlog records (or logs) every keystroke, mouse movement, and window change. All the logged writing process activities are time stamped. The log files can be analyzed within Inputlog from different perspectives: fluency, pause, revision, and - of particular interest when studying recursivity - source use (Vandermeulen et al., 2020b ). Studying the dynamics of the writing process using Inputlog allows us to understand the complexity of writing as a process; however, the conclusions that can be derived from the records are inferential and establishing a direct link between keystrokes and cognitive/metacognitive activities is often not evident (Galbraith & Baaijen, 2019 ). It is therefore advisable to complement this method with others that directly capture the cognitive/metacognitive activity of the subject when performing the task (Wengelin et al., 2019 ).

The present study

Recursivity seems deeply involved in source-based writing tasks, such as argumentative synthesis writing. It may help to connect reading and writing processes and to re-introduce relevant information in the students’ working memory as they proceed in the writing task. However, it is still unclear whether recursivity is associated with strategic processes when going back to sources. Moreover, it is unclear to what extent recursivity is associated with argumentative synthesis performance. These aspects led us to propose the current research, through which we aimed to learn more about writers engaging in an argumentative synthesis task: (a) the strategies they employ in reading the source texts, (b) the recursivity that occurs in their writing of argumentative syntheses, and (c) the quality of the argumentative syntheses that they produce, especially intertextual integration. We were also interested in differences between high and low recursive writers in terms of their reading strategies, patterns of recursivity, and quality of their syntheses. In this study, university student writers read and wrote on the controversial topic of evaluation of education; specifically, about the advantages and disadvantages of standardized student assessment and the evaluation of teachers’ professional practice. Thus, the objectives of this research were as follows:

To describe recursivity behavior (identified through keystroke logging) in university students while reading conflicting sources and while writing argumentative synthesis.

To compare high- versus low-recursive writers on the quality of argumentative essays and the recall of the sources.

To compare high- versus low-recursive writers on strategic behavior, assessed by a think-aloud protocol.

Based on past evidence, studies suggest that writing performances of students in synthesis tasks are still suboptimal, even at the higher education level, and that recursivity is may not found in the behavior of many subjects with less experienced (e.g., secondary school level, see Vandermeulen et al., 2020c ; undergraduate students, Tarchi & Villalón, 2022 ). However, in our study the participants were postgraduate students and the task demanded the use of a significant number of sources, so we expected a moderately higher level of recursivity. Moreover, we hypothesized that recursivity is associated with higher quality in argumentative synthesis written essays. In particular, recursivity should be associated with a higher level of intertextual integration. Moreover, we hypothesized that recursivity would be associated with cognitive and metacognitive strategies while reading sources. In other words, we expected for high-recursive students to write more integrated essays and to be more strategic when reading then low-recursive students.

A recall measure was also included in the research design to investigate the impact of recursivity on retention and depth of processing. In this way, we could investigate whether recursivity influences the way sources are elaborated, besides the quality of students’ written products. Recall allows to assess students’ representation and long-term retention of the text content. Valid inferences, rather than literal comprehension, is a strong index for depth of comprehension, as it represents the links students did between text content and prior knowledge when reading (Diakidoy et al., 2015 ; Tarchi & Villalón, 2021 ).

The following variables were also assessed: perceived prior knowledge, prior beliefs, and need for cognition. These three variables have been found connected with argumentative synthesis writing (see Dai & Wang, 2007 ; Tarchi & Villalón, 2021 ) and may be associated with recursivity. Students with low perceived prior knowledge may struggle in strategically approaching the task and proceed more linearly. Students with skewed prior beliefs may find it unnecessary to process belief-inconsistent texts. Students with low levels of need for cognition may be not so engaged in a complex task such as argumentative synthesis.

As in much of the multi-text reading research (e.g., List & Alexander, 2020 ; Schoor et al., 2023 ), we divided the task into a reading phase and a written production phase. However, since synthesis writing is a hybrid task, we must acknowledge that much composing was, no doubt, occurring as students first encountered the sources during the reading phase of the study.

Participants

Forty-three university students participated voluntarily in the study (13 males, 29 females, one preferred not to declare gender; age mean = 23.9 ± 2.04). All participants were enrolled in a Master’s degree program in Educational Psychology. All participants were Italian and spoke Italian as their primary language. Data was collected anonymously (the participants included a personalized code in each task). The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Florence (Italy).

Different variables related to the participants were assessed; specifically perceived prior knowledge and prior beliefs about the topics addressed in the source texts, as well as need for cognition. Perceived prior knowledge was evaluated through an item (“What is your level of knowledge on the topic of evaluation in school”?) to be rated on a scale from 1 (minimum) to 6 (maximum). Prior beliefs were assessed through an 8-item questionnaire including four items reporting a pro-evaluation stance ( e.g., it is necessarily to evaluate teaching quality ) and four items reporting an against-evaluation stance ( e.g., There is no sufficiently well-founded consensus on what constitutes good teaching practices to create an evaluation system ). The four against-evaluation items were reverse coded. The composite score was obtained by adding up all the ratings: the higher the score, the more pro-evaluation the beliefs were. The reliability of the scale was adequate (α = 0.71). Need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982 ) was assessed using an 18-item questionnaire ( e.g., I like tasks that require little reflection once they have been learnt ). Participants scored each item on a 5-point Likert scale (from 1 = completely false to 5 = completely true). The reliability of the scale was adequate (α = 0.87).

Source texts

We used four texts previously employed in studies about argumentative synthesis writing (e.g., Granado-Peinado et al., 2019 ; Mateos et al., 2018 ). The texts discussed the topic of how to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in the school system.

Two texts addressed the topic of teachers’ evaluation; namely, the advantages and disadvantages of conducting an evaluation of teachers’ professional practice, in order to improve the quality of instructional processes (one of the texts addressed the advantages, and the other, the disadvantages). The text in favor of teachers’ evaluation received the name of “Improving the quality of teaching” (599 words) and presented arguments supporting the use of teachers’ evaluation to improve teaching quality. The text against teachers’ evaluation was titled “Good intentions, bad outcomes” (594 words), and included the problems regarding the implementation of instructors’ evaluation.

The other two texts dealt with the topic of student assessment, through standardized and external performance tests, one taking a positive position and the other taking a negative position. The text related to the advantages of students’ evaluation received the title of “Students ‘assessment and education quality” (502 words) and included arguments supporting the use of students’ performance evaluation as a way to improve the quality of educational processes at school. The text related to the disadvantages of students’ evaluation was named “The performance evaluation trap” (612 words), and it included arguments related to the difficulty of deriving improvements in education from these standardized and external evaluations.

The original texts were written in Spanish, adapted by the second author based on texts used in previous studies (Authors, XXXX), so prior to the implementation of the study they were translated into Italian. Cultural adaptability to the Italian educational context was ensured by the first author. Texts had similar readability scores (calculated through the Gulpease, a legibility index for Italian, range 0-100): “Assessment and quality of teaching” (Gulpease index = 45), “The performance evaluation trap” (Gulpease index = 47), “Improving the quality of teaching” (Gulpease index = 43), “Good intentions, bad outcomes” (Gulpease index = 48). Overall, texts were balanced by length, difficulty and number of supporting arguments (seven each text). Excerpts from texts are included in the Supplementary Material A .

To aim our objectives, the following procedure was followed. Firstly, the participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire including an assessment of individual variables and demographic information. Secondly, participants were asked to perform a source-based writing task. They were asked to read four texts on a controversial topic. While reading, the participants were asked to think-aloud. Then, participants were asked to write on a personal computer an argumentative essay based on the sources that they had just read. They were asked to write the essay (with access to sources) while keystroke logging software Inputlog was working in the background. Finally, a week later, they completed a free recall task.

The reading-writing task was conducted online with the direct supervision of an experienced researcher. Prior to the experimental session, students were: (1) instructed how to think-aloud, (2) asked to practice thinking-aloud with two texts provided by the researcher, (3) asked to send a sample of the think-aloud to the researcher. Finally, they received feedback on their think-aloud practice. Then, students were: (1) instructed how to install Inputlog on their device, (2) asked to practice starting and ending the writing sessions with Inputlog, (3) and asked to send a sample of the output to the researcher. Finally, they received feedback on their think-aloud practice. Think-aloud and Inputlog practice sessions were all well performed by the participants on their first attempt. In the experimental session, students were asked to work in a quiet environment and perform the task without interruptions and in the same session. The researcher was available for an online meeting throughout their session for any issue. First, students received the four texts and were asked to read while thinking-aloud. Participants recorded their think-alouds and sent them to the researcher. Immediately after the task, students activated Inputlog and performed the writing task. As soon as they had finished, they were asked to submit the Inputlog output to the researcher. The exchange of materials between students and the researcher was performed through a learning management system. All participants completed the task with no issues. Think-alouds and Inputlogs files were carefully reviewed by the researchers to identify any invalid performance.

Reading task

Students were given four digital texts on the debated topic (see paragraph on texts within the material section for details). They were given the following instructions: “You will now read four texts that argue positions on a controversial topic in education. You can read them as many times as you like and return to them as many times as you like. When you have finished reading the passages, move on to writing. You will be asked to write an essay that discusses the positions expressed in each text and includes a conclusion that integrates the strengths of the positions expressed.” This instruction was given so that participants knew that they had to read texts with the purpose of writing an argumentative synthesis essay.

While the participants were reading, they were asked to think-aloud, that is: “say out loud everything that is on your mind, whether inherent in the text you read or not. You should verbalize as much as you can, in any case at least every two minutes (a timer will help you keep time).” Before the reading task, participants practiced think-aloud with a practice text and received feedback from the researcher. The whole reading task was recorded through a screencast software to capture both the reading activity and the thoughts voiced aloud.

Writing task

The participants were given the following instructions: “After reading the texts, you will have to write an essay that, based on the texts you have read, discusses the positions expressed in each text and includes a conclusion that integrates the strengths of the positions expressed. This is a time and effort-consuming task, as it involves consulting the texts, extracting and connecting the key ideas from the four texts, and writing an essay that draws your own conclusion and explains in a well-argued manner why you came to that conclusion. You can go back and read the texts as many times as you like. There is no time limit for this exercise, but it is very important to perform the reading and writing task in one work session, without interruptions.” This instruction was given to help students understand what an argumentative synthesis task is. This type of task is uncommon in the Italian educational system, and students needed some explanation of what it was expected from them.

While performing the writing task, Inputlog was running in the background and logging the writing process. Students were instructed not to take notes on paper. In this way, Inputlog could register every instant the students switched between their own text document and the digital sources, in this way, students’ recursive behavior was logged.

Free recall

After one week, the participants were asked to recall as much content as they could from the texts that they had read (without accessing them). This measure provides an indication of long-term comprehension of the texts.

Strategic reading from think-aloud protocols

Strategic reading was assessed through a think-aloud protocol, which was transcribed and coded following a category system elaborated following a deductive-inductive process. First, we analyzed the scientific literature, identified the studies that investigated strategic reading through think-aloud and created a list of reading strategies (e.g., Bereiter & Bird, 1985 ; Bråten & Strømsø, 2003 ). Then we examined 10% of the protocols to identify reading strategies that were not included in the list. This was the final list of reading strategies: Summarizing, Linking to prior knowledge, Digressing from topic, Expressing agreement with text, Linking to prior experiences, Identifying new information, Making proposals, Expressing disagreement with text, Voicing opinion, Identifying new perspectives, Expressing doubts, Assessing source, Comparing texts.

The protocols were coded through Qcamap (Fenzl & Mayring, 2017 ) by two independent coders, with a good inter-rater agreement ( k = 0.85). Then, we proceeded to calculate a composite score by adding the frequencies of all the functional reading strategies implemented (prior knowledge + agreement with text + prior experiences + new information + proposals + disagreement with text + personal opinion + perspective on topic + doubts + source relevance texts comparison). Verbosity was also assessed (total number of words expressed).

Recursivity in writing from Inputlog

Recursivity was assessed through Inputlog while students were writing, capturing the degree of recursivity between the essay and the sources, among several other indices of the writing process. We counted the number of transitions between the essay and the source texts, which were available when students were writing (absolute recursivity). The total number of transitions was then divided by the total time on task, resulting in a recursivity indicator: the total number of transitions between the sources and the essay per minute. Since the time participants spent on the task differed, it is also recommended to work with relative measures, so that recursivity can be compared between participants (relative recursivity).

Quality of syntheses from text analyses

Students were asked to write an argumentative essay on the topic discussed in the texts. The quality of the essays was assessed considering three different dimensions:

1) The level of argument-counterargument integration. As mentioned in the introduction, in this study we have adopted an analytical approach consistent with the proposal of Nussbaum and Schraw ( 2007 ), based on the intertextual integration of arguments and counterarguments (elements defined from other theoretical perspectives as claim and counter claim or position and counter position). Regarding this criterion, we employed the following coding tool developed by Mateos et al. ( 2018 ); authors who also rely on the framework of integrating arguments and counterarguments. See Table 1 (see supplementary materials B for an extended version):

As seen in the coding system, refutation strategies are considered to be of lower level than weighing and synthesis strategies. This is due to the association of refutation with processes still linked to the bias of one-sided reasoning (Mateos et al., 2018 ; Nussbaum, 2008 ).

2) Intertextual theme : whether students are able to identify the storyline connecting the texts to each other and whether they explicitly state it in their essays. We assigned the following scores: 0 (students do not identify the common theme); 1 (students only mention the common sub-topic of two texts); 2 (students identify the two sub-topics discussed in the four texts and explicitly state it in the essay).

3) Supraintegration : if the students are able to propose solutions that respond to the controversies addressed in four texts, i.e., not only based on one of the sub-topics. We assigned the following scores: 0 (the student focuses on one of the two sub-topics - either external evaluation tests or teacher evaluation - without proposing solutions that address both aspects); 1 (the student is able to mention arguments linked to the two issues, but not to propose solutions for both aspects); 2 (minimal supraintegration: the student proposes at most two solutions to give a combined answer to the problems of the two sub-topics); 3 (maximum supraintegration: the student proposes more than two solutions to give a combined answer to the problems of the two sub-topics).

Two independent judges (authors 2 and 4 of the paper) coded 38% of the argumentative essays to calculate the inter-rater reliability. Reliability indexes were appropriate for the three dimensions (ICC Integration: 0.85; ICC Intertextual theme: 0.81; ICC Supraintegration: 0.67). The cases in which there was no agreement were resolved by consensus, and the remaining 62% of the essays were evaluated by one of these researchers using the established criteria. Essay length was also assessed.

Delay recalls

A week after reading the texts, students were asked to recall what they had read. The outcome variable was the number of valid inferential clauses, as a measure of depth of comprehension. Valid inferences are logical connection across content discussed in different parts of a text (local inferences) or in different texts (intertextual inferences). Moreover, we also considered valid inferences logical connection between new information from the texts and students’ prior knowledge (global inferences) (Diakidoy et al., 2015 ; Tarchi & Villalón, 2021 ). Two raters coded independently the protocols, with a good inter-rater agreement ( k = 0.90).

Data analysis

Research objectives were investigated through descriptive statistics and non-parametric statistical analyses, given the low sample-size and the non-normal distribution of data. To address the first objective (description of recursivity behavior), we analyzed the descriptive statistics and calculated through a series of non-parametric comparisons for paired samples (Wilcoxon test) to determine in which interval (relative) recursivity was higher. Rank biserial correlations were used as a measure of effect size.

To address the second objective (comparison between high- versus low-recursive writers in argumentative quality), we analyzed the interaction between recursivity and outcome variables through a series of non-parametric comparisons for independent samples (Mann-Whintey test), with rank biserial correlations as a measure of effect size. To this end, high- (n = 22) versus low-recursive writers (n = 21) were identified through a median split of the relative recursivity score. While this approach is less than ideal from a statistical perspective, it helps to provide some initial data on reading and writing processes. Preliminarly, we investigated if there were pre-existing difference between groups in prior knowledge, beliefs, or need for cognition.

To address the third objective (comparison between high- versus low-recursive writers in strategic reading), we conducted a series of Mann–Whitney U tests on each reading strategy, with rank biserial correlation as a measure of effect size. The same two groups of high- and low-recursive participants were used in this analysis.

Descriptive statistics for individual variables related to the participants (i.e., perceived prior knowledge, prior beliefs, need for cognition and time on task), process variables (recursivity, strategic reading) and outcome variables (from the essay and free recall tasks) are reported in Supplementary Materials C . Descriptive analyses revealed that the strategies most employed in prereading were all related to synthesis activities; specifically voicing opinion, expressing agreement, and expressing doubts.

Description of recursive behavior

Overall, students spent 82.5 min completing the task (with a median of 76.50). In terms of absolute recursivity values, students went back and forth between the text they were writing and the sources they were reading 55.05 times (with a median of 40). In terms of relative recursivity values, students switched on average 0.58 times per minute (with a median of 0.51). To address our description objective, relative recursivity was used as an independent variable. Students’ performance measured with Inputlog was split into three time intervals: beginning, middle and end This was done by dividing each writer’s total time on task into three equal parts. Because of the complexity of the research design, it was only possible to collect data on a small number of subjects. Due to the sample size of the study and the non-normal distribution of some of the variables, nonparametric tests were performed.

According to Wilcoxon’s test, recursivity in the middle (Median = 0.64) was higher than recursivity in the beginning (Median = 0.43) and in the end (Median = 0.37), see Table 2 .

The following two cases (see Fig. 1 ) serve as an example to illustrate the recursive behavioral pattern over the three phases (i.,e., time interval) of the writing process as measured with keystroke logging. As there is quite some variance in recursivity among the students, we present a case of a high-recursive writer (Fig. 1 , case on the left side) and a case of a low-recursive writer (Fig. 1 , case on the right side). Recursivity is visually represented at the bottom of these graphs by the orange line. When the orange line runs at the top, the focus is on the sources. Every red dot represents a source text. When the orange line runs at the bottom, the focus was on the student’s synthesis text. The blue and green lines show the text production (y-axis: number of characters) at a certain point in time (x-axis). The blue line shows the production during the process, while the green line represents the production in the document. We refer to Vandermeulen et al. ( 2020b ) for a more complete description of the process graph.

As can be observed in the process graphs, both the high- and the low-recursive writer start the process with a focus on the sources. The second phase of the writing process is marked by text production and a certain degree of recursivity. Also in the third and final phase, text production is dominant. These patterns are in line with findings from previous studies on writing processes of source-based tasks. Synthesis writing processes are generally marked by an initial reading phase (Chau et al., 2022 ; Vandermeulen et al., 2020d ) followed by text production in the middle part of the process. Additionally, recursivity is important for the integration of information or arguments (Vandermeulen et al., 2020c ).

In the beginning of the writing process, both the students read the sources without going to their own text document (the orange line runs at the top), so (almost) no text production is taking place. The second process phase is marked by text production. After reading the sources, the students start writing their own text. Both production lines are increasing. An analysis of the keystroke logging data of these two cases shows that the high-recursive writer produces 98 characters per minute in the middle part of the process, thus text is produced rather fluently. At the same time, this student displays a rather high recursivity in the middle phase; this is reflected in the switches between the synthesis text and the sources (2.13 switches per minute). The time spent in the sources is considerably lower than in the first process phase (25% in the second part versus 72% in the first part) as it concerns quick switches between the text document and the sources. Based on these observations, we can argue that it is plausible that the high-recursive writer regularly goes back to the sources to look for information to incorporate in their text. It can be assumed that it is a goal-oriented activity as the checking of the sources is combined with fluent text production.

Although the low-recursive writer switches considerably less frequently between the synthesis text and the sources than the high-recursive writer, recursivity is the highest in the middle part of the process (0.70 switches in phase 2). Although the writer starts producing text in the middle phase of the process, text production is not fluent as this writer types 44 characters per minute. This is not surprising given that it is rather hard to produce text fluently when one relies on their memory to retrieve information from the sources that were read in the first phase of the process.

Illustrative cases: Process graphs generated by Inputlog of the writing process of a high-recursive and a low-recursive writer

Differences between high-recursive and low-recursive writers

Differences in strategic reading (process variables).

For this analysis, we referred to absolute recursivity as relative recursivity was not associated with strategic reading. Overall, high-recursive students had more strategic reading than low-recursive students did (U = 137, p < .05). As a post-hoc analysis, we repeated the Mann-Whitney test on each category. It must be noticed however, that since we are implementing a multiple testing procedure, results should be interpreted with caution. High-recursive writers voiced more their opinions about text content, expressed more doubts and compared the texts more frequently (see Table 3 ).

Differences in argumentative synthesis writing and delayed recall

To address the second objective, we analyzed the interaction between recursivity and outcome variables through a series of non-parametric comparisons (with rank biserial correlations as a measure of effect size). We also identified high- (n = 22) versus low-recursive writers (n = 21) through a median split of the relative recursivity score. While this approach is less than ideal from a statistical perspective, it helps to provide some initial data on reading and writing processes. Students with different recursivity levels (high- versus low-recursive students) did not differ in any individual variables, namely perceived prior knowledge (U = 156, p > .05), prior beliefs (U = 158, p > .05) or need for cognition (U = 112, p > .05).

According to the results from the Mann–Whitney U test (employed because of the non-normal distribution of the data), intertextual activity and recall of valid inferences differed across recursivity levels. In both cases, high-recursive writers outperformed low-recursive writers. To better understand at what step in the intertextual integration process recursivity may have an impact, we repeated the Mann–Whitney U test on each level of intertextual integration (see Table 4 ). High-recursive writers outperformed low-recursive writers in intertextual theme identification and supraintegration, but not in intertextual integration.

Source-based writing and argumentative reasoning are two fundamental skills in today’s world. We are exposed to complex and controversial topics such as climate change, geopolitical conflicts, pandemics, which require the ability to develop an informed opinion which takes into consideration multiple perspectives and supporting arguments. For these reasons, students should be engaged in argumentative synthesis writing, a type of task in which learners are asked to synthesize multiple perspectives based on sources. Unfortunately, research has demonstrated that students’ competence in writing argumentative synthesis essays are suboptimal, even in higher education (Hyytinen et al., 2021 ; Marttunen & Kiili, 2022 ; Nelson & King, 2023 ; Tarchi & Villalón, 2021 ). To contribute to the scaffolding of students’ competences in argumentative synthesis writing tasks, we focused our attention on recursivity, that is, going back and forth between the text we are writing and the sources we are reading (Du & List, 2020 ; Mateos & Solé, 2009 ; Tarchi & Villalón, 2022 ), to provide evidence of the writing process by keystroke logging. Moreover, it is still unclear to what extent recursivity is a strategic process. The present study aimed at addressing these two issues and also to provide more information on the recursivity variable itself.

In the present study, participants displayed an overall minimal level of integration across texts in their essays. Most of the essays were rated as “Minimum integration via weighing or synthesizing with no or partial conclusion.” (Mode = 4). Regarding our first objective, describing the participants’ recursivity behavior, if we look at absolute scores, the level of recursivity among university students involved in an argumentative synthesis writing task seems reasonably high (half of the participants with at least 40 switches between written text and sources), although with a high dispersion of data points, illustrating a consistent variance of recursivity within our sample. Although the absolute number of switches seems high, when we take into account how long they worked on the task, we notice that participants did not switch that often. In respect to the relative scores, our results are coherent with past studies that have indicated that recursivity is most frequently carried out in the middle part of the writing process (Vandermeulen et al., 2020c ). Moreover, overall, the relative level (number of switches per minute) was relatively low, compared to performances reported in previous studies. For instance, inspection of data gathered as part of national baseline study in the Netherlands (Vandermeulen et al., 2020a ) shows that Dutch students in their last year of upper-secondary school, switched on average 3.02 times per minute between the sources and their text when writing an argumentative text based on conflicting sources. Conversely, in our study we found an average of 0.58 of switches per minute. There are several reasons that may explain this result. Firstly, in the previously referenced national baseline study (Vandermeulen et al., 2020b ), students wrote for a maximum of 45 min, whereas in our study the task was open and students took an average of 82.5 min. This could depend on a higher complexity of the task (depending on the topic or the texts) or a higher engagement. Secondly, university students may have a more strategic approach or a higher expertise when reading sources, thus requiring to switch from sources to text less frequently. On the contrary, our sample was quite homogeneous for other control variables. This might be also the reason because we found no effect of the control variables we explored.

The hypothesis we had for the second objective was substantially supported by our data analysis and coherent with previous studies (Du & List, 2020 ; Solé et al., 2013 ). High-recursive students had a better performance in identifying the complexity of the issue explored (intertextual theme identification and supraintegration). However, intertextual integration performances in argumentative essays did not different across recursivity levels. This last result contradicts our research hypothesis, and it may depend that on the fact that the intertextual integration we used (Mateos et al., 2018 ) was originally designed and employed for intervention studies in which students were being taught the three strategies described by Nussbaum and Schraw ( 2007 ) and were expected to use them. Participants in those studies also had less complex pro-con tasks, with only a single major issue and only one pro-text and one con-text.

Moreover, the recall of valid inferences was also associated with a higher recursivity, indicating that a more effortful and nonlinear processing of the sources during writing fosters reading comprehension. These results are, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct evidence supporting the relevance of recursivity for intertextual integration and depth of comprehension in source-based writing. However, recursivity is not frequently found in the common behavior of secondary or even undergraduate students (Fidalgo et al., 2014 ; Mateos et al., 2018 : Solé et al., 2013 ) For that reason, it is essential that they receive instruction that includes this element, although it seems it is not easily incorporated. Tarchi and Villalón ( 2022 ) tested whether it is possible to scaffold university students’ recursivity through critical questions. The intervention was effective in improving text quality and induced, at least in some participants, a higher recursivity level as compared to the control group.

In this line, the hypothesis we had for the third objective was also supported by our data analysis. Recursivity was associated with strategic processing during reading, as assessed through the think-aloud methodology. This is in line with previous research (Du & List, 2020 ; Solé et al., 2013 ), pointing out that recursivity is linked to self-regulated writers. Past research on thinking aloud when reading multiple texts has emphasized the importance of organization and comprehension confirmation strategies in high-grade students, whereas most of the sample engaged in more shallow processing of texts and implemented memorization and elaboration strategies (Bråten & Strømsø, 2003 ). In this study, expressing opinions and doubts, and comparing the texts were associated with recursivity, suggesting that students may have looked back at the sources while writing their own text to integrate content across texts or text information with prior beliefs.

Limitations and directions for future research

When interpreting the findings of the current study, some limitations should be taken into account. Firstly, the sample size was quite low, although larger than in previous studies with similar methodologies (Du & List, 2020 ; Solé et al., 2013 ). For that reason, it was not allowed to run more complex analysis. Nevertheless, the sample size was appropriate for the statistical analysis performed in this study. As we provided evidence supporting the relevance of recursivity, future research should further investigate it.

Secondly, recursivity was associated with strategic reading but not with strategies implemented while writing. This was done as think-aloud is a methodology validated for reading but not for writing. The use of retrospective think-aloud protocols may address this issue (although participants do not always recall correctly what they were thinking). Moreover, we used Inputlog only when writing and not when reading not to overload participants, but in future the reading and writing activities should be studied more in terms of a flow of interweaved processes and activate Inputlog and or think-aloud from when they start reading to when they finish writing.

Thirdly, working memory, along with several other individual differences, may have influenced learners’ performances (e.g., the free recall measure or the actual need for recursivity). Given that the present research design does not allow us to assess working memory, future studies should investigate the influence of working memory on recursivity.

Conclusions

Recursivity is a behavior that can be tracked with softwares such as Inputlog. Thus, it represents a good candidate for being a learning analytics associated with quality of writing. As the reliance on online platforms to support learning processes is increasing, there is a high demand for automated assessments of writing products and processes (Strobl et al., 2019 ). Recursivity may be tracked to provide feedback to students as they progress in their writing. For instance, students displaying a low level of recursivity may receive a warning to go back to sources while writing, to support either planning, composing, or revising.

Importantly, the qualitative analysis of two writers suggests that high- versus low-recursive writers seem to address the task with different approaches. Good writers refer more often to sources at the beginning of the process, whereas in both cases they go back to sources in the middle part of the process. Our study suggests that more research is needed to investigate what good writers do in the initial stages of writing.

In the current society, citizens need to deal with information from different sources on a controversial topic and they should be able to express their own view in writing. Given that recursivity is a central element when composing a source-based text, students need evidence-based instruction which marks the role of it (Castells et al., 2022 ; van Ockenburg et al., 2019 ). In order to develop such instruction, it is of utmost importance to gain a better understanding of recursion processes. Past studies have shown that instruction may improve recursivity (Tarchi & Villalón, 2022 ). However, insights obtained from this study could provide valuable input to develop interventions aimed at supporting students’ source-based writing and, more in particular, the recursive process. More research on how recursivity is developed and promoted should be carried out, but this study is a first step.

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Essay Writing is a Recursive Process Discuss

Recursive ‘is a process of doing things again and again till they make sense and ready to be presented to the audience and the lecturer’ as highlighted by Ebest, at al (2005). It is a repetitive way, which makes the generation and the bringing up of new ideas and points easier, until they make a good flow and sense to the audience and the lecture as presented on https://goo.gle/tYpMcp. This process has five stages which are needed to be taken into account before starting to write an assignment, essay or thesis. These stages are as follows prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and proof reading as shown by Langan (2005) (6th ed). This process goes an extra mile in writing, as the writer takes his or her time to think on what he or she is about to write and how to put it on paper.

When writing an essay, assignment or thesis we must firstly do the prewriting process. The prewriting process is the process when you only have the topic paper and the pen, which means, one will be starting on scratch. At this stage, that is when one need to think as wide as he can. Prewriting can also be called the planning process on what you want to write. As presented by Clawson. (2016) https://youtu.be/ASw-iAd1TZo he highlighted that it has four stages which are as follows brainstorming, free writing, questioning and clustering . He said ‘brainstorming is the way of coming up with an idea or something like a memorable event in your life experience.’ When we have a topic we take a second step which is free writing, he highlighted this as, ‘free writing as a way of writing anything that comes on to your mind.’ Then the third step he said ‘questioning is the way of asking questions to yourself like which, where, what, when, why and who.’ Then on clustering he said it is the last stage of free writing process as, ‘it is when we take all those things we had thought off onto a paper and start to organise them.’ This process of planning is a good way of coming up with ideas and knowledge on how to come up with something we do not have an idea on before, it helps people to have composure whenever they are given an assignment.

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Furthermore it is very easy to those who are not even interested in writing and composing, because it has simple procedures to follow. It gives a writer more time to think and organize on coming up with something which will be very interesting to the audience. However prewriting process is very monotonous because it needs more time to think for it, to be effective and to create a good meaning to the audience. It is not applicable when someone has things that are affecting him or her emotionally that will not give him time to think about anything, and the assignments will be needed to be handed in two days. If any procedure is missing in coming up with an essay it will be meaningless to those whom you are presenting to.

We then move on to the second stage of the writing process which is the drafting process. Drafting process ‘it is where by we take those ideas generated from the prewriting process on to the paper or a first draft as you can refer to the plan or the prewriting process’ as indicated by Sebraneck (1992). He also said ‘you can come up with ideas you never came across when you were jotting down the points in the first stage.’ It leads to the development of the existing ideas and generation of the newer ones. ‘When rereading the first draft you can come across and you may discover a word, phrase or an idea that can be stated well’ this was highlighted by Ebest, at al (2005). He took this idea further when he said ‘writing on a paper does not mean the first paper drafted is the one which focuses on perfection.’ Drafting can shut the creative side of your mind and lead to writer’s block. As presented on https://youtu.be/xqk6-ePxPa8 they also said ‘it is the product of free writing process.’ This process it involves the organisation of thoughts that have been presented on the prewriting stage till they make a meaning and sense. ‘It helps the writer to elaborate key ideas which are mainly focusing on the given topic or assignment’ as propound by Elbow (2019). However drafting process is stressing as it is also a process of repetition of what have been done in the planning process.

It requires a lot of papers to be drafted before taken to the final draft and time taken will be more as you will revisit to the same thing. It leads to boredom as much time will be spent doing the same thing.

The third stage is the revising stage theses are now the final stage of the recursive process. Revising stage it is when we polish the styles and fix grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. This stage requires one to have fresh eyes as it is one of the final stages of the writing process. ‘It involves rearrangement of paragraphs and sentences you may add or you can take out information for it to make sense’ as highlighted by Strunk (1995). You can discover some furs in the arrangement o statements of the sentences and also calling for transposition. This is the managing and correcting stage. This process also involves the generation of the new idea as removing irrelevant sentences and correcting misspelt words leads to addition of new flesh on to the points for them to make sense. The correction of your own mistakes it helps a writer to have more time researching more about the assignment. It gives room to consult friends to come and take a look and go through your essay and correct you and give ideas and correct you before going on to editing. ‘This stage makes the essay unique, more precise and effective’ as highlighted by Lyons (2000). However as this process needs to revisit what we have done it will lead to forgetting and ignoring other points that we thought they were strong enough without adding anything. The involvement of friends may lead to misunderstandings as they will try to take other points in different ways to create different meanings.

The fourth stage is the editing process which will lead us to the final product of writing process. Revising it also involve rearrangement of paragraphs. Strunk and White (1995) said ‘they can produce what they are after on the first try quite often you will discover, on examining the completed that they are furs in the arrangement.’ Which means this stage requires more focuses and interest to make the corrections. This process is an ongoing process, not a onetime even. It is encourages the author to edit his work as possible. This process focuses on the correction and the correct use of grammar punctuation. It is easy to correct the errors when you go through your own work reading out loud as it can be ease to allocate where you have made a mistake. The editing of your own work need to be done more than two or more times to impress the readers. Nordquist (2019) highlighted that ‘most effective editing involves tightening …. Short run or work and it becomes better’. This process avoids mistakes to be presented to the audience as it takes a broader look on the correction of mistakes. As moving step by step makes the writer to think on adding some flesh to the sentence and add meanings. It gives the writer confidence to make his work more cohesive and more interest as he will correct his own mistakes made during composing. It makes good flow of the essay or presentation. However this process is very time consuming as you redo editing more than two times.

The last stage is the proofreading process which is the end product of the prewriting process. Proof reading one feels comfortable with the style of your writing as you will be ready to publish. This involves going through every point and every statement in looking for errors and punctuation, spacing, capitalisation of words, sources used and italics used.

In an, nut shell essay writing is a recursive process as the advantages outweighs the disadvantages like it is time consuming. It creates boredom as there is repetition of the work done. There are lot of procedure that are needed to be taken into account. So the prewriting, process, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading are needed to be taken into account in coming up with a good essay and to make a good flow.

Reference List

Clawson. C (2016) ‘Brainstorming’ Available at https://youtu.be/ASw-iAd1TZo (accessed on 16 may 2016).
Ebest, S, B., Alred, G, J., Brusaw, C, T. and Olio, W, E (5th ed) (2005) Writing A-Z.
New York: McGraw Hills Companies Inco.
Langan, J. (6th ed) (2005) College Writing Skills. New York: McGraw Hill Inco
Lyons, E.(2002) Notification Book Proposal Anybody can Write. New York: Penguin Random House
Nordquist, R. (2019) Editing available at Wikipedia (accessed on 03 July 2019).
Sebraneck, P., Merger, V. and Camper, D. (1992) Writers Inc. Burlington: Educational Publishing House.
Mometrix Academy. (2019) ‘Recursive Writing Process’ available at https://goo.gle/tYpMcp (date accessed on16 may 2019).

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Writing and Process Essay BY ni4238901 Process essays are essays that explain to the audience how to do something or how to complete a task. This may involve explaining how to put items or ingredients together to make a finished product, such as in a recipe. These essays can also explain how to accomplish a

My Process of Writing

Everyone has a different type of writing process that they go through every time that they write a paper from start to finish. I personally like to start writing a paper at least a week in advance before it is due that way I will receive a good grade for the assignment. I’ve always liked

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Recursive Writing Process
Brainstorm ideas, talk to a friend, complete a graphic organizer, draw pictures, freewrite, create an outline and a working thesis statement. At this stage, include all ideas that occur to you; do not edit anything out. You will probably want to return to your pre-writing ideas later in the process. If you are writing a researched essay, this ...
Essay writing is a recursive process. Discuss?
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 ...
PDF Understanding Writing as a Recursive Process
A recursive process refers to the way writers often loop back or revisit earlier work as we write. Say a writer has planned pretty carefully how a draft will be. 50. organized. Even with careful planning, once in the middle of that draft, she might realize that part of that plan isn't working out as she imagined.
Writing as a Process: Writing is Recursive
Good academic writing is both a process and a product. Writing is recursive. "Recursive" simply means that each step you take in your writing process will feed into other steps: after you've drafted an essay, for instance, you'll go do a bit of verification of some of your facts—and if you discover that you've gotten something wrong ...
PDF A Guide to The Recursive Writing Process
The Recursive Writing Process The recursive writing process is a non-linear approach to writing that emphasizes the repetitive nature of drafting, revising, and editing. Unlike a linear process, which follows a straightforward path from prewriting to final draft, the recursive process allows writers to move back and forth between different ...
Writing Is Recursive
It's the style of writing that you may have been taught in elementary school or that you've seen in historical documents like the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. "Cursive" comes from the Latin word currere, meaning "to run.". Combine this meaning with the English prefix "re-" (to do again), and you have some clues ...
Resources for Writers: The Writing Process
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. Prewriting. Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document.
Writing Is Recursive
You're probably familiar with the root of the word: "cursive.". It's the style of writing that you may have been taught in elementary school or that you've seen in historical documents like the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. "Cursive" comes from the Latin word currere, meaning "to run.". Combine this meaning with ...
Defining the Writing Process
People often think of writing in terms of its end product—the email, the report, the memo, essay, or research paper, all of which result from the time and effort spent in the act of writing. In this course, however, you will be introduced to writing as the recursive process of planning, drafting, and revising. Writing is Recursive
Writing Is Recursive
In modern English, recursion is used to describe a process that loops or "runs again" until a task is complete. It's a term often used in computer science to indicate a program or piece of code that continues to run until certain conditions are met, such as a variable determined by the user of the program. The program would continue ...
Exploring Writing as a Recursive Process
In simple terms, recursive means "repeating" a process. Though, in more academic lingo, recursive means to do something "several times in order to produces a particular result or effect" (Cambridge). That is to say, working through a particular project and then repeating stages of the project to perfect your end goal is an example of ...
A Guide to English: The Writing Process
Writing in Response by Matthew Parfitt. Call Number: PE1408 .P275 2012. ISBN: 9780312403935. Publication Date: 2011-12-23. "Writing in Response is a flexible, brief rhetoric that offers a unique focus on the critical practices of experienced readers—analysis and reflection—the skills at the heart of academic writing.
1.2: Defining the Writing Process
People often think of writing in terms of its end product—the email, the report, the memo, essay, or research paper, all of which result from the time and effort spent in the act of writing. In this course, however, you will be introduced to writing as the recursive process of planning, drafting, and revising.
The Writing Process
Table of contents. Step 1: Prewriting. Step 2: Planning and outlining. Step 3: Writing a first draft. Step 4: Redrafting and revising. Step 5: Editing and proofreading. Other interesting articles. Frequently asked questions about the writing process.
2.3: An Overview of the Writing Process
Writing is a recursive process of forming, developing, and clarifying our ideas, causing them to evolve in unexpected directions. To produce ideas worth sharing, we need to slow down the process of analysis, taking the time to carefully examine each of its components. This page titled 2.3: An Overview of the Writing Process is shared under a CC ...
ENGL001: Research Writing as a Process
Research Writing as a Process. Writing does not occur in a vacuum. That is to say, writing is a process that involves more than sitting down at a desk and plugging words into a computer. When we write, we brainstorm and prewrite, we draft, we ask for feedback, we revise, we ask for feedback again, and we revise some more.
Writing is Recursive, NOT Linear: Free Task Cards Included!
She has taught high school English for 10+ years in Dallas, Chicago, and New York City and holds a M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University. She has always had a connection to the written word-- through songwriting, screenplay writing, and essay writing-- and she enjoys the process of teaching students how to express their ideas.
2.3: Writing is a Non-Linear and Recursive Process
According to this method, it is impossible to write the body of a text before the introduction. Similarly, within this framework, you cannot write a conclusion before the introduction is finished, and so on. Writing is a non-linear and recursive process. This means that most writers do not "begin at the beginning" of a piece and "end at ...
PDF Essay writing process
Essay writing process Academic Skills Division of Student Success An essay presents a well-argued discussion or response to a question or proposition, using . analysis and critique of relevant literature. It establishes a proposition or thesis and presents a . point of view. Process. The following are suggested steps for writing an essay. 1.
PDF Recursivity in source-based writing: a process analysis
middle of the synthesis process, as writers developed their arguments, instead of at the beginning or end. (3) High-recursive writers surpassed low-recursive writers by producing argumentative essays of higher quality and obtained better recall scores. They also employed more critical processing relevant to synthesis when reading the sources.
Recursivity in source-based writing: a process analysis
In university settings, writing argumentative essays from reading conflicting source texts is a common task for students. In performing this synthesis task, they must deal with conflicting claims about a controversial issue as they develop their own positions. Argumentative synthesis is characterized by writers' back-and-forth moves between reading source texts and writing their own texts ...
Essay Structure
Essay Structure. A well-structured essay is important as it enhances readability, ensures logical flow, and effectively communicates the main ideas. When your essay is clearly organised it helps the reader understand and retain the essay's key points.
Essay Writing is a Recursive Process Discuss
Recursive 'is a process of doing things again and again till they make sense and ready to be presented to the audience and the lecturer' as highlighted by Ebest, at al (2005). It is a repetitive way, which makes the generation and the bringing up of new ideas and points easier, until they make a good flow and sense to the audience and the ...

2 Recursive Writing Process

Good writing: It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint!

Pre-writing: Why am I writing? What do I already know? What do I want my audience to know/learn?

Drafting: What do I want to say? Where do I need more research?

Revising & Editing: Which areas need work?

Proofreading & Publishing: What mistakes can I fix?

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Essay writing is a recursive process. Discuss?

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Guide to Writing at Stetson University

Writing as a Process: Writing is Recursive

Thesis statements and topic sentences perform nearly the same function in your writing: each one makes a claim, or states a main idea, and each one serves as a central focus connecting ideas presented earlier and leads to ideas about to come.

Have a question? Ask a librarian! Email [email protected]. Call or text 386-747-9028.

Writing Is Recursive

Invention: Coming up with ideas.

Research: Finding new information.

Drafting: Creating the text.

Revision: Literally, seeing the text again.

Editing: Looking at the surface level of the text.

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Resources for Writers: The Writing Process

An Overview of the Writing Process

Writing is Recursive

Developing Your Writing Process

A Writer’s Process: Ali Hale

A Writer’s Process: Anne Lamott

Writing Is Recursive

Invention: Coming up with ideas.

Research: Finding new information.

Drafting: Creating the text.

Revision: Literally, seeing the text again.

Editing: Looking at the surface level of the text.

The Writing Post

What does Recursive Mean?

How is the writing process recursive?

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Writing Craft

A Guide to English: The Writing Process

In this Section

On this Page

Pre-writing

Consider the Rhetorical Situation

Developing a Search Strategy: Brainstorming, Concept Mapping, and KWHL

Narrowing Your Topic

Gathering Sources

Creating an Outline

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The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Table of contents

Coming up with a topic

Doing the research

Check for common mistakes

Evaluating the first draft

Redrafting and revising

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Editing for grammar and clarity

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

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Jack Caulfield

ENGL001: English Composition I

Introduction

Product and Process Theories of Writing

Product-Based Writing

Process-Based Writing

Writing is a Non-Linear and Recursive Process

Applying the Process Approach to Research Writing

Writing Activity: Examining Past Writing Experiences

The Main Stages of the Writing Process

Invention Techniques

Free-writing

Brainstorming

Mind-Mapping

Keeping a Journal or a Writer's Notebook

Examining your Current Knowledge