Documenting Your Writing Process

How to document your writing process(es)

Professor Bob Broad, Department of English, Illinois State University

Finally, writing is epigenetic, with the complex evolutionary development of thought steadily and graphically visible and available throughout as a record of the journey, from jottings and notes to full discursive formulations.
From Janet Emig, "Writing as a Mode of Learning." CCC 28.2 (May 1977): 122-28.

It is as important and rewarding to me as a teacher of writing to see writers collaborating, reflecting, risking, and learning during the writing process as it is to see powerful and successful texts emerge at the end of the writing process. For this reason I weigh your documented writing process equally with your final writing products when I evaluate your major written project(s). For any writing project the process of which I have said I will evaluate, I therefore recommend you take the following steps when composing your portfolio for the course.

Include the first substantial draft, the final draft, and at least one in-between draft, each draft clearly dated and numbered ("First draft," etc.);

Include all peer response you received and indicate how you did or didn't use it;

Include all professor's response you received and indicate how you did or didn't use it. If you received the professor's response in a writing conference or by way of recorded audio comments from the professor, you should provide a sheet on which you have made fairly detailed notes of what was said in the conference or audio response.

Provide a brief (100- to 200-word) "process memo" in which you sketch your writing process, noting what you did and did not do along the way.

Include anything else that will help me see how you have revised and developed your project.

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