Writing to Think: The Writing Process vs.

Writing to Problem Solve

Writing teachers often talk about “The Writing Process” and when they do they frequently describe 4 stages: Pre-Writing, Drafting, Revising, and Editing.

Pre-writing is the stage during which you think and make notes about what you might want to write in the paper you have been assigned. There are several common techniques for this: brainstorming, listing, concept mapping, talking to a roommate and then taking notes about what you find yourself saying, freewriting, or just making notes to yourself. You are “writing” during this stage, but only for yourself--not yet for a reader.

Drafting: Having figured out in your pre-writing what your claim/center is going to be, and what specific evidence or illustration you will use to back up that claim/center, you are then in a position to write your paper. You may do this over days; you may (like many students) do this over a few hours late at night just before the paper is due (though few teachers would recommend the second of those strategies!).

Revising is just that: re-working and polishing your draft once you have written it. Revising is meant to make your draft more complete, more readable, better able to convey your thinking.

And then Editing is usually the last step: having finished the thinking and composing part of your process, you now look to make sentences more readable, or repair grammar or vocabulary or spelling issues or errors—anything that might confuse or put off your readers.

A Different View of the "Writing" Process

To be sure, the Writing Process as a set of steps has helped many writers get going on a project, but it can be misleading. It sets out a method for writing the kinds of papers one does for TOEFL exams or SAT exams and short papers in first year composition: often just 5 paragraphs or 3-4 pages: an intro, three to five body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

You can be very good at such papers, but they are only one kind of paper—the five paragraph essay: usually a personal opinion paper you can write in an hour or two.

But many of the papers you'll write for courses beyond first year composition are not the kind of paper you can brainstorm for or sit down and write at midnight the evening before it is due. For one thing they are longer, but more important, they generally ask you to solve some kind of problem related to the field in which the class you are taking resides. Such assignments may also ask you to locate, read, and assess scholarship relevant to the project.

In short, they ask you to do research enough to learn enough to solve the problem the assignment has set for you. The standard "Writing Process" that helped you with SAT or TOEFL essays is not designed for papers of this sort.

But there is another Writing Process, one that works better for research based writing for term papers in a number of academic fields.

Two things follow from this: 1) procrastination—something that many of us have made a habit—is a really bad strategy, and 2) Pre-writing exercises like brainstorming or free writing--fine for generating material for an SAT essay or even an application for admission to a university--won't substitute for searching out, reading, assessing, and integrating your research materials

That doesn't mean that writing isn't part of your process anymore. It's just a different kind of writing, a kind of writing that asks from you three kinds of “writing”:

Writing to Problem Solve (W1),

Writing to Communicate (W2), and

Writing for Readability (W3).

What follows below is a short description of Writing to Problem Solve followed by an illustration of how they apply to at least one assignment.

Writing to Problem Solve (Writing 1)

This is writing you do to analyze, understand and clarify the problem your assignment sets for you. It differs from W2 (See next section), by being completely unconcerned with your readers. With W1 you are not writing to anyone at all yet, just to yourself.

You might ask: "So if it is to no one, what’s the point?!" I would answer: " Your BRAIN is the point!"

Cognitively speaking, Writing 1 is an important means to expanding and supporting your brain’s Working Memory (WM). Because any human being’s WM is quite limited (see Learning About Learning for more on this), most of us can hold in working memory only 5-8 pieces of information at once. If, for example, I ask you to remember the number 694 and then ask you 30 seconds later to repeat that number, most of us could do it with high reliability. But if I give you a set of numbers like this: 8410338419, for most of us that number will stay in your mind only a few seconds, if at all.

More generally, because our minds are limited in how much we can think of consciously, as a rule we can only solve complex problems when we find ways to expand our WM’s space, and one of the best ways, if not THE best way, to do that is to off-load thoughts from your working memory by writing them down such that they can be sorted, questioned, expanded, replaced, deleted, or made central to one’s next move.

Writing 1 is a great help in engaging and solving a problem, and its role is to help you solve the problem a given assignment has set. With simple essays (like SAT or TOEFL essays) you may not need a lot of W1, but with complex assignments it’s still W1's writing things down along with research that enables your brain to think its way to solving assignment problems effectively.

To illustrate how an assignment can be not so much a "writing assignment" as a "problem solving assignment," here is an abbreviated version of an actual assignment made in a UW World Health Class:

The Culture and Mental Health Project

Students will complete a culture and mental health research project for the course.  

This project will involve choosing a mental health condition that has a culturally specific manifestation (idiom of distress or culture bound syndrome) or a mental health condition (broadly defined) that develops from, or is shaped by, a social/cultural/behavioral process.  

Students will chose their own topic, complete a detailed outline of their paper, and complete a final paper.  

The outline and paper will reflect a detailed review of the literature focused on the mental health problem, a review of culturally-specific aspects of the problem, and potential (culturally appropriate) methods of addressing the problem.

Example titles of projects are ‘Globalization and farmer suicides among rural Kenyan men,’ ‘The legacy of colonialism on substance abuse in the Caribbean’, or ‘Suicide among Information Technology workers in Bangalore, India’.  

That assignment is not asking for a simple five paragraph essay with a claim, three paragraphs of support and a conclusion. Instead it outlines criteria for a research project that requires formulating and solving a set of problems whose conclusions, once reached, are then to be “written up” and submitted.

This assignment asks students to figure out several things before you can even start to write. Which culture will you study? What mental health condition fits the requirement that it be developed from or shaped by “a social/cultural/behavioral process”? And what will you have to learn before you can even decide what you want to study?

So, for this project your problem solving would require you to read, do research, make various choices—and it will help you greatly to be writing notes to yourself as you go. That’s W1 at work (Writing to Problem Solve—and it is also a W1 task as you start to draft paragraphs that explain what you have learned.

After a good deal of research and of jotting things down and finding the right words to use, you finally (also using W1) can begin your paper by first writing out a list—what you’ll say first, what second, and so on. Basically that’s writing an outline—another kind of W1 writing whose purpose is to help your brain move from researching and learning to setting up a logical order in which to communicate to your professor the results of your problem-solving.

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Then, having used W1 to solve the set of problems this assignment has given you, and having figured out what is coming first, second, and so on, you finally move from Writing 1 (W1) to Writing 2 (W2)—or Writing to Communicate.

Now, this kind of writing, too, may seem hard, but because you have used your W1 skills to sketch out your thinking, and because you've by now already made a list of the things you are going to talk about (your "outline") you are finally ready to go to W2.

Once you know what you are going to say W2 becomes something like a version of speaking on paper (indeed, some people write by dictating to a recording program from notes they’ve written in W1!).

To be sure, a project like this is challenging, but again, the challenge isn’t so much the “writing” of a paper as it is, first, engaging and solving a complex problem, a problem that W1—informal jottings and notes and sentences to help your brain as you go—enables you to solve. And second, via W2, you report out your findings.

As a final step in your writing process for assignments like this is W3, or Writing for Language Clarity. This is proof-reading, the point where you go back and read your paper carefully and look for anything that makes your language seem confusing—whether it’s a word, a sentence, or a paragraph. Get help if you need it—indeed, writing center tutors can be very helpful in all three of these stages in the process of writing your paper.

This last kind of attention to your paper is do your best to spell check and make your writing as readable as you can. Lots of students worry more about W3 and its editing than they should—spelling and punctuation are not as important as having solved the problem the assignment set, and then communicated your thinking effectively through W2. But that doesn't mean that some teachers won't think W3 important, so it's still worthwhile to proofread the best that you can.

We will talk more about all of this when we get to the research section of the course.