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The Writing Process and Argument Writing

The writing process involves the planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing of written work. As you go through the steps of the writing process, keep these three questions in mind:
• What is my task? Your task is the kind of writing you want to create. It could be an e-mail, a story, a blog post, or a review.
• What is my purpose? Your purpose is your reason for writing. Do you want to give information? To tell about something that happened? To give your opinion?
• Who is my audience? Your audience is the person or people you are writing for.

Let’s look at the writing process and how it applies to writing an argument.

PLANNING Planning begins with selecting a topic of interest to you. Then finding information on your topic and organizing your ideas before you begin to write.
• Select a topic: Try brainstorming, freewriting, or using a graphic organizer to explore ideas. For example, when you plan to write an argument, ask yourself, “What issues do I feel strongly about?” Then freewrite, or write all of the ideas that come to you.
• Find more information: Use books and the Internet to find information related to your topic. You can also talk to people who are knowledgeable on that topic.
• Make a claim: Use the information you find to form a claim, or an opinion that you will support with reasons and evidence in your argument. Be aware of opposing claims, too. You will need to acknowledge them in your argument.
• Organize your information: Put your information in logical order. You might use a graphic organizer or an outline to help with this. In an argument, for example, you would put your reasons in the order you want to present them. Then you would put your evidence where it belongs—with the related reasons.

DRAFTING Write a draft of your work.
• State a claim: Make your claim clear to the reader in your introduction. In your claim, state your position, or the main idea about your topic. Here is an example of a stated claim that you could use to build an argument: “Having more community gardens builds connections among neighbors and improves people’s diets.”
• Follow your plan: Remember when you organized your information during planning? You decided the order you wanted to present reasons and evidence. Follow that plan as you write.
• Explain and connect ideas: Always keep your claim in mind as you develop your ideas. Show how each reason connects to your claim. Use transition words, phrases, and clauses to help you connect ideas within and across paragraphs.
• Maintain a formal writing style: Avoid contractions and slang. Craft interesting, complex sentences, and organize them to create coherent paragraphs.
• End well: Draft a concluding paragraph that restates your claim and also wraps up your writing in a satisfying and memorable way for your readers.

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REVISING Look for ways to strengthen your writing. Try to see your work as a reader would.
• Add evidence, examples, and explanations: Decide whether your reasons and evidence are solid, or whether you need more facts and details or better examples to make your point. Make sure you have acknowledged opposing claims. Also check to see if there is something you should add or remove to convince your audience to agree with your claim.
• Correct organization and structure: Examine the organization of your work. Move details, sentences, or even paragraphs, if necessary, to make ideas and the connections between ideas clearer. Make sure that your introduction and conclusion make a suitable impact on your readers.
• Refer to the Revising and Rewriting Checklist as you revise your work.

EDITING Go through your final draft carefully to search for errors or opportunities for improvement.
• Correct mistakes: Search for and fix errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
• Check language: With your audience and purpose for writing in mind, replace informal language with formal language.
• Refer to the attached Editing Checklist as you edit your work.

PUBLISHING Share your work with others.
• Find your audience: You wrote with a specific audience in mind, so now it is time to let that audience read your work. Look for ways to share your writing—through print, digital media, or both.

DRAFTING AND REVISING AND EDITING—AGAIN! The writing process is not top-to-bottom. You move back and forth between parts of the process as often as necessary. For example, say that while revising, you discover that you have too little evidence to support a reason. You look for new information, and then reorganize your work to include the new evidence.

Directions
In this activity, you will prepare to write an argument by completing the planning stage of the writing process.

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Part 1

1. Choose a topic of interest that can lead to a claim. For example, you might be interested in the importance of community service or preserving green spaces in neighborhoods. List some topics of interest to you.
2. Underline the topic you want to write about.
3. Freewrite what you already know about this topic.
4. Review your notes and come up with a claim about your topic. For example, you might claim that middle school students should earn school credit for community service. Or you might claim that neighborhoods should include natural spaces for wildlife. Write your claim.
5. Use a graphic organizer or an outline to list reasons and evidence that support your claim.


Part 2:

Submit your claim and graphic organizer or outline to your teacher for approval. Remember that you may have to do some additional research to support your claim before you are ready to draft your essay.


Note: A Revising and Rewriting Checklist and an Editing Checklist are available in the Student Resources attached to this activity.

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The writing process involves planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing written work. As you go through each step of the writing process, think about these three questions:
• What is my task? Your task is the kind of writing you want to produce, such as an e-mail, a story, a blog post, or a review.
• What is my purpose? Your purpose is your reason for writing. Is it to explain a procedure? To inform about a specific topic? To express your opinion on an issue?
• Who is my audience? Your audience is the person or people you are writing for.

Let’s look at the writing process and how it applies to writing an informative or explanatory text.

PLANNING Planning involves choosing a specific subject, finding more information about it, and organizing your ideas before you start writing.
• Choose a subject. Try brainstorming, freewriting, or using a graphic organizer to explore ideas. For example, ask yourself, “What subject do I want to write about?” Then freewrite, or write all of the ideas that come to you about that subject.
• Find more information. Use books, articles, research journals, and the Internet to find information related to your topic.
• Narrow down your subject. Use the information you find to help you decide what particular points about your subject/concept you want to inform or explain to your readers.
• Organize your information. Order your information in a way that is logical to the reader. For an informative text, for example, first group related ideas, facts, and details together and then determine the order you will use to present them. Try using a graphic organizer or an outline to help you.

DRAFTING Write a draft of your work.
• State your central idea. Make your central idea clear to the reader in your introduction. Here is an example of a central idea statement: “Smartphone technology has advanced rapidly allowing people all over the world to stay in constant communication, find information quickly, and enjoy thousands of music and entertainment apps.” Notice that this sentence addresses a narrow topic on the broader subject of smartphones and previews the key points that the author wants to make about that topic.
• Follow your plan. Write out your information in the order you decided on during the planning stage. For an informative text, make sure your groups of related ideas, facts, and details are laid out in a logical order.
• Explain and connect ideas. Expand on your information by adding examples, definitions, quotations, and other information. Use transition words, phrases, and clauses to connect ideas and make transitions between sentences and paragraphs.
• Maintain a formal writing style. Avoid contractions, colloquialisms, and slang. Use a mix of simple and complex sentences and organize those sentences into cohesive paragraphs.
• End well: Draft a conclusion that restates your central idea, summarizes and supports your key points, and leaves your readers with a sense of completion.

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REVISING Look for ways to strengthen how you present your ideas and information. Try to see your work with fresh eyes, as a reader would see it.
• Add information, examples, and explanations. Assess whether the information you have presented is clear, thorough, and interesting. Ask yourself whether you need more details or better examples to express your ideas. Double-check your transitions and make them stronger and smoother if necessary. In an informative text, take another look at your facts and details. Determine whether you should add or delete anything in order to help your audience fully understand your ideas.
• Correct organization and structure. Analyze the organization of your work, and move details, sentences, or even paragraphs as necessary to make your ideas clearer. Ensure that your introduction and conclusion will make the desired impact on your audience.
• Refer to the Revising and Rewriting Checklist as you revise your work.

EDITING Go through your final draft thoroughly.
• Correct mistakes. Search for and correct any errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
• Check language. Replace informal language with formal language to better suit your audience and purpose for writing.
• Refer to the attached Editing Checklist as you edit your work.

PUBLISHING Share your work with others.
• Find your audience. You wrote with a specific audience in mind, and now is the time to share your finished product with that audience. Look for ways to distribute your writing to interested readers—in print, through digital media, or both.

DRAFTING AND REVISING AND EDITING—AGAIN! The writing process is not top-to-bottom. You should move back and forth between parts of the process as necessary. For example, while revising, you may find that you need more details to describe an event. If that happens, do further research, find new information, and then reorganize your text to add in the new facts and details smoothly and logically.

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Directions
In this activity, you will prepare to write an informative or explanatory text by completing the planning stage of the writing process.

Part 1

1. Choose a subject that interests you. For example, you might be interested in the environment or new technology. List some subjects that interest you.
2. Look at your list of subjects and underline the one you want to write about.
3. Freewrite what you already know about this subject.
4. Review your notes and narrow down the focus of your subject. For example, you might want to explain how no-fishing zones help protect marine life or inform readers about the latest trend in gaming technology. Write a sentence stating your central idea.
5. Use a graphic organizer or an outline to list ideas, facts, and details that support your central idea.


Part 2

Submit your central idea statement and graphic organizer or outline to your teacher for approval. Remember that you may have to do some additional research to find further facts and details that support your central idea before you can draft your text.


Note: A Revising and Rewriting Checklist and an Editing Checklist are available in the Student Resources attached to this activity.

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Organizational strategies include definition, in which you explain the meaning of terms or concepts that may be unfamiliar to your readers. You can also use classification to group your ideas into related categories based on shared characteristics. The comparison and contrast strategy involves highlighting the similarities and differences between ideas, events, or concepts. Cause and effect describes how one or more ideas, events, or concepts cause or are related to another.

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When writing an informative or explanatory text, it is important to develop the text with relevant information so the reader can gain a thorough understanding of the topic. There are several ways to develop the topic of a text, such as: by providing relevant facts, by defining key terms, by including specific details, by incorporating quotations, or by supporting key ideas with examples. Depending on the topic, a text might use one or a combination of these options.

Appropriate transitions help the reader understand connections between the ideas in a text. Transitions clarify relationships among ideas and concepts. It is important to use transitional words, phrases, or clauses to strengthen or clarify the relationships in a text.

Readers benefit from precise language. Choose words that help communicate detailed and accurate information. When you are writing about a topic that belongs to a particular domain, or area of study, be sure to use domain-specific vocabulary to accurately capture the ideas you are presenting to readers. Using precise language and domain-specific vocabulary is helpful for supporting key ideas and information.

Lastly, be sure to write in a formal style. A formal style follows all spelling, punctuation, and grammar rules. Avoid using contractions, slang, or casual language. In fact, using precise language is also a feature of formal style, as is the use of strong, clear transitions. Texts that use a formal style tend to have longer or more complex sentence structures.

In this activity, you will read an informational text about how jokes work and analyze how the author developed the topic and used transitions, precise language, domain-specific vocabulary, and a formal style.

Here’s How
Here are some questions and tips that can help develop an informative or explanatory text successfully.
• Boldface your central idea in your introduction. Then italicize the key ideas in the remaining body paragraphs. Underline each relevant fact, definition, specific detail, or example that supports your ideas. Have you developed each key idea with at least two kinds of support?
• Select a font color and use that color to identify the transitions you use within or between paragraphs. Have you helped the reader move from one idea to the next? Do your transitions clarify the relationships between your ideas?
• Identify and boldface words and phrases that are vague or unclear. Replace them with clear, precise language. If your topic requires it, include domain-specific vocabulary.
• Check that you have used a formal writing style. Revise to eliminate slang words and contractions, and see if you can combine simple sentences into more complex, formal sentences.

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The Writing Process and Narrative Writing

The writing process involves the planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing of written work. As you go through the steps of the writing process, keep these three questions in mind:
• What is my task? Your task is the kind of writing you want to produce. For example, a story could take the form of a book, a graphic novel, or a play.
• What is my purpose? Your purpose is your reason for writing. When you write a narrative, you’re often writing to entertain. But a narrative can also provide information or send a message to your readers.
• Who is my audience? Your audience is the person or people you are writing for.

Let’s look at the writing process in more detail and see how it applies to writing a narrative.

PLANNING You will need to have the key elements and ideas for your story in place before you begin to write.
• Find your idea: Narratives can be based on real events, or they can spring entirely from your imagination. That means inspiration can come from anywhere: a photo, a news story, an interesting experience or event, an unusual location, or a memory. Once you have a few ideas, try brainstorming, freewriting, or using a graphic organizer to explore them. Then choose the one that interests you most and that you feel you could turn into a fully developed narrative.
• Map out story elements: Use a graphic organizer, like a story map, to plan out your characters, settings, and main conflict. You may also want to think about a theme, or message, that you want to share with your readers.
• Organize your story: Think about what your key events will be, and put them in a logical order. In a narrative, events are usually presented in chronological order; that is, they are related in the order in which they occurred. Events should also build gradually in intensity, advancing to the climax and conclusion.
• Don’t lose track: Keep your planning materials together so you can refer to them when you draft and revise your work.

DRAFTING Write a draft of your work.
• Start with the exposition: The exposition is the beginning of a narrative; it provides readers with any necessary background information. Orient your readers by introducing your characters, describing the setting, and putting the main conflict in motion.
• Follow your plan: Remember when you organized your story during the planning stage? You decided the sequence, or order, in which you wanted to present the events of the narrative. Follow that plan as you write, but don’t be afraid to change your plans if your story starts taking you in a new direction.



• Use relevant descriptive details: Now’s your chance to flesh out the plan you made. Add descriptive details to help the story come alive for readers. Include sensory language and precise words and phrases where appropriate.
• End well: Draft a conclusion, or ending, that follows logically from and reflects on the experiences or events in the narrative. Tell your reader how a character has changed, give a hint as to what may happen next, or relate the outcome of the narrative’s events.

REVISING Look for ways to strengthen your writing. Try to see your work as a reader would.
• Add descriptive details and better utilize narrative techniques: Look for places where you can add more description to better develop events, experiences, and/or characters. Also, look for places to insert dialogue or alter the pacing of events to make the narrative come alive.
• Correct organization and structure: Examine the organization of your work. Move details, sentences, or even paragraphs, if necessary, to make the sequence of events clearer or more logical. Make sure that your conclusion reflects on or links back to the exposition in some way.
• Refer to the Revising and Rewriting Checklist as you revise your work.

EDITING Go through your final draft carefully to search for errors or opportunities for improvement.
• Correct mistakes: Search for and fix errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
• Check language: With your audience and purpose for writing in mind, replace vague or unclear words and phrases with more precise language.
• Refer to the attached Editing Checklist as you edit your work.

PUBLISHING Share your work with others.
• Find your audience: You wrote with a specific audience in mind, so now it is time to let that audience read your work. Look for ways to share your writing—through print or digital media, or both.


DRAFTING AND REVISING AND EDITING—AGAIN! The writing process is not top-to-bottom. It’s recursive, which means you move back and forth between parts of the process as often as necessary. For example, say that as you draft, you realize that one of the events you were going to write about should have come earlier in the story. You can go back to your planning documents and rethink the sequence of events. Then you can revise the earlier section of the story.

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Directions

In this activity, you will complete the planning stage of the writing process for producing a narrative.

Part 1

1. Find an idea. Brainstorm a list of interesting real-life experiences or observations that you think could be turned into an engaging narrative. You may also want to jot down some ideas from your own imagination. Look over your list and mark three or four that interest you the most, or that you feel have the most potential for becoming a fully developed narrative. Then freewrite about those ideas until you find one that really excites you.
2. Figure out the key narrative elements. Use a graphic organizer, such as a story map, to plan your characters, setting, and main conflict. For example, you can choose passengers on their way to a summer concert as your characters, a bus as a setting, and a sudden earthquake as your conflict. Write a summary of those narrative elements.
3. Refer to your story map and develop the key events of your narrative. For example, the key events of the earthquake story could include a festive opening scene on the bus, the sudden earthquake, the partial crumbling of the bridge the bus is on, and the passengers’ attempts to escape.
4. Use a graphic organizer, such as a sequence chart, to put the events of your narrative in a logical order. Remember to start with events that introduce the character(s), setting, and conflict; build to a climax; and end with a conclusion that follows logically from earlier events in the narrative.

Part 2

Submit the summary and sequence chart (or other graphic organizer you used to plan your key events) to your teacher for approval. Remember, you can add additional details or make some structural changes before and during the drafting stage.


Note: A Revising and Rewriting Checklist and an Editing Checklist are available in the Student Resources attached to this activity.

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A narrative is a type of writing that tells a story. The story can be about real or imagined experiences or events. The essential elements of a narrative include characters, setting, conflict, and plot. It’s not enough to have these elements, though; a strong narrative reflects a number of techniques the writer uses to guide the reader from the introduction through the events of the story to the conclusion.

When writing a narrative, always keep your theme in mind. That is, decide what message, lesson, or important idea you want your reader to focus on or understand, and make sure the events in your story help deliver that message.

Also pay attention to how you sequence your events. Most narratives are presented in chronological order, which means the events unfold in the order in which they occurred. The best narratives also gradually build in drama. They move steadily toward the climax—the point of highest tension or emotion—and then continue by showing how the main conflict is resolved, or sorted out.

As you continue to draft your narrative, consider what descriptions you want to include—and what you can leave out. What details are relevant to the story line? Which ones help you move the narrative to its conclusion?

Finally, make sure your narrative has an effective conclusion that presents a logical outcome for the events of the narrative. The best conclusions often wrap up the narrative by summarizing the events, showing a character reflecting on those events, and/or tying back to the theme or main conflict. You can also leave your readers with a sense of how your characters have changed and an inkling of what might happen next.

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