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The Writing Process is the pathway that all great scientific writing follows. By moving through these steps, you ensure that you are preparing and conducting your academic writing in a logical order. The Writing Process is also useful to help you become more organized during research and writing while helping you to become a better writer. Use this resource whenever you are beginning a new writing assignment, or when you are unsure of what to do next with your research and writing.

The writing process consists of more steps than just sitting down and writing the paper from start to finish. If you start directly by writing your introduction or any other part of your paper, you may experience that you run into a writing block, or end up writing sections that will never actually end up as part of your thesis. Similarly, you would not start building a house by erecting a wall directly on the ground. You first need a foundation and a framework for the house. Any academic paper or a thesis is the same, you need a clear framework before you start your actual writing.

Recognize that the difficult part of writing, organizing information and forming analysis, takes place BEFORE you start writing your first draft. This is the purpose of outlining, to clarify your ideas, structure and evidence in an effort to make writing easier.

Recognize that the most difficult part of writing occurs in the Prewriting Stages. Writing it not hard, but organizing your ideas, forming connections, analyzing and synthesizing information and presenting evidence takes time. This is the purpose of outlining: to organize the individual parts of your research into a coherent whole that is logically structured and well thought out.

The Writing Process

Feedback

It is vital to get feedback on your drafts as you progress through your writing process. Often you will find that ideas that might seem completely clear to you, may not seem clear at all for someone outside your project. Receiving feedback will provide you with important insights into what parts of your thesis still need more work and can help you to further develop your ideas.

Supervisor

Agree with your supervisor how often you can send drafts of your thesis. Some supervisors want to be very involved in the writing process and request a draft of what you are working on every week. Others may prefer to leave the writing mostly up to you, which means you have to look for regular feedback somewhere else. Independent of your supervisor’s level of engagement, ensure that your supervisor reads a draft of your thesis at an early stage. This ensures against having to do major rewriting of your thesis in the last few weeks before submission.

Peers

In addition to your supervisor, your peers may give excellent feedback on your drafts. This may be fellow students, friends, roommates, or even family members. Exchanging drafts with fellow students and commenting on each other’s draft may be very useful. Make sure when you are commenting on each other’s drafts you remain critical, but always constructive and make specific suggestions on how they can improve. Do not be afraid to point out when you misunderstand something. If you fail to understand things, it is highly likely that others will also.

Writing Centre

The Writing Centre offers free writing assistance to students writing their thesis or any other academic work. You can book a 45 min consultation to get help with your master thesis every week, or you can drop-in and see if any writing advisors are available. When writing your thesis, start coming to the Writing Centre early, as the writing advisors can help you best during the early stages of your writing, such as the prewriting stage, outlining, and the first draft. The Writing Centre does not provide proofreading services, so there is no point coming to the Writing Centre for help days before you are submitting, to get all your spelling and grammar mistakes corrected.

Read more about the Writing Centre or book an appointment

External resources

How to give peer feedback?

The Writing Process - Purdue Online Writing Lab