How to Use This Guide

This document is intended to highlight resources that can be used to address the topic of Writing as a Process in a First-Year Writing Course. All resources are Open Access and can be downloaded or added to a Course Management System via hyperlink.

Introduction

This portion of the course is intended to recommend the best open educational resources related to process writing, including identifying the steps in the writing process, understanding that the process is flexible, generating ideas for development of a topic, narrowing the topic in order to identify a thesis, drafting the essay and handling writer’s block, organizing the draft, engaging a peer review process, creating successively improved drafts, using revision and editing to improve the drafts, and assessing the effectiveness of the writing process.

These skills will overlap with other learning objectives (e.g. Critical Thinking, Conducting Research, etc.), and instructors will likely want to use these resources and design activities in conjunction with other learning objectives. Further, this module assumes that instructors have chosen their own primary readings (academic journal articles, examples of student research papers) as examples to which the strategies outlined in these resources may be applied. It should be noted that the skills involved in the writing process are not only applicable to the academic writing presented in a first-year writing course, but to a broad cross section of the rhetorical patterns employed in many cultures and languages.

Learning Objectives

This module is designed to address the following learning objectives:

1. Identify the steps in the writing process
    
2. Understand that the process is flexible
    
3. Generate ideas for development of a topic
    
4. Narrow the topic to identify the working thesis
    
5. Create an outline
    
6. Draft the essay while handling writer’s block
    
7. Organize and reorganize the draft
    
8. Engage the peer review process
    
9. Create successively improved drafts
    
10. Use revision and editing to improve drafts
     
11. Create a working outline
     
12. Assess the effectiveness of the writing process
     
13. Revise the process as needed.