The process of writing from sources: Thinking, Reading, Tracking, Organizing
Author: Paulína Danková
Author: Paulína Danková
“Good writing is clear thinking made visible.” - Bill Wheeler
Academic writing is a very complex process. As opposed to personal writing, it requires a lot of time, detailed preparation and working with relevant sources. But how should we start writing at all? What are the main steps in writing process which we should follow? Is it recommended to embark on the topic immediately or to make some draft before that?
If you want to start writing your bachelor thesis or capstone project and you don't know how to go about it, welcome on this webpage!
Writing process
Writing is not done without a thorough preparation. Choice of right thinking, reading, drafting and organizing strategies can increase your chances of being successful in academic writing. The following videos can be helpful for you if you need some information and several tips how to write effectively.
The video illustrates the model of writing process and its five steps: 1. Prewrite, 2. Drafting, 3. Revising, 4. Editing, 5. Publishing. Following these steps can help us to write better, easier and faster not only in essays and large publications, but also in academic school works.
Lecturer on his Youtube channel Interactive English introduces several tips how to improve and develop writing skill. Conciseness, organizing a paper, avoiding inappropriate phrases and repetitions, using active voice or proofreading are the keys how to be successful in writing.
The first video clearly introduced a brief scheme of writing process and its important steps. Now let's look at these steps described by S. Bratcher (1997) in more detail. As you can see, we also supplemented Bratcher's words with our own advices and concrete examples:
This section adapts Bratcher's (1997) approach to writing process. Obviously, when you start writing a bachelor or diploma thesis, you should engage in the following steps:
Thinking, Reading, Talking
✔ Choosing a good topic can be hard. We recommend choosing something that you are interested in and something that your academic advisor/mentor approves and is interested in. We also recommend doing early active readings (highlight ideas, write questions on your texts, include summary sentences, etc.) and discussions about your topic with your advisor or peers to identify a specific angle that you want to focus your work on. This reading-thinking-talking stage in the process can be messy and time-consuming, but it is probably the most important stage! If you are not clear on what you want to say, how can you write a good paper or thesis?
Prewriting
✔ What can help you think through your topic are various prewriting strategies. For example, once you have your topic and you know who your audience is (typically your professors), it is good to write down your exact purpose and your key references as per this example:
Identifying Key Rhetorical Information Strategy
Topic: Interpretation of Literary Texts as a Reading Stimulus
Audience: Students studying English, English teachers, poets, prose writers, literary theorists, translators
Purpose: To interpret the aesthetic function of tropes and point out their impact on the reading experience
Reference sources: (try to use only credible sources written by experts who have been dealing with the topic for a long time, such as literary theorists, linguists and so on). For more information about how to ensure that you are choosing credible sources, please scroll lower on this page.
Outlining and Organizing Ideas Strategy
After you have thought about your topic, credible articles, and have complete clarity on your audience, expectations, and purpose, it is a good idea to outline your ideas and/or create a table or visual organizer to help you keep track of information from your sources. Notice how the writer in the outline below, included the sources from which to draw information!
Example:
Introduction to the topic: literary communication between author and reader
typology of interpretation (Draw on Smith, 2021, Mihalkova, 2018)
reading methods and strategies (Mihalkova, 2018, Petterson, 2015)
thematic and linguistic characteristic of literary texts from a phonological (Petterson, 2015, Holk, 2012), morphological, lexicological, syntactic (Smith, 2021) and stylistic aspect (Mihalkova, 2018)
analysis of concrete literary texts
summary
Drafting
✔ Once you are clear on what you want to say and how you want to organize your ideas you can start drafting. At this stage, focus on getting your ideas out and not getting stuck. Be sure you make it clear which ideas are yours and which ones are from your sources. Ask your advisor or mentor to read a few pages from your early draft and give you feedback so that you know if you are on the right track! Example:
I. Nosková (2014) defines literary communication (from lat. communicatio - transmission) as the transmission of a message through graphic signals, and it is a complex process. Graphic symbols, as we could see in Nosková's definition, will be presented as tropes in our work like metaphors, personifications, synecdoches or poetic questions.
Important note: If you are struggling with how to integrate your own voice with the selected citations, consider the information at the bottom of this page: Response Strategies for Citations.
Revision
✔ During the revision process, you have to be willing to make bigger changes. Oftentimes these will be a result of your advisor's feedback or conversation. You may be asked to add information, improve your argument, find more sources. Don't get discouraged! Revising is a big part of the writing process! You may also be asked to clarify your source as per this feedback from a professor: "Who is Ingrid Nosková?"
⬇
REVISED PARAGRAPH:
I. Nosková (2014), a teacher, expert in didactics and a worker at methodological and pedagogical center, defines literary communication (from lat. communicatio - transmission) as the transmission of a message through graphic signals, and it is a complex process. Graphic symbols, as we could see in Nosková's definition, will be presented as tropes in our work like metaphors, personifications, synecdoches or poetic questions.
Editing
✔ Editing is the final adjustment of the text before publishing and sharing, it includes a final control of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, citation or paragraphing, adding new words and sentences if necessary.
⬇
Publishing
✔ Publishing may involve binding an academic work (e.g. bachelor thesis, diploma thesis) although increasingly, electronic copies are preferred by many institutions.
Reading and Transfromation Process
Before you start writing don't forget on reading stage. It is not necessary to read totally everything, word by word, sentence by sentence...Focus on the content, titles, subtitles and main key words in sources, scan the texts quickly to search for the most important information and then transform them into sentences. Inspire by two reading techniques - skimming, scanning:
In the video you can be acquainted with two reading techniques which are also described by Ayu Sonia Habibah Fisher (2016) in her article:
skimming - a high-speed reading based on saving time and looking only for the general or main ideas in recount text
scanning - a slow and careful reading in order to find some key words or particular information in the text
Difficult, but very important aspect is selection of ideas. You certainly ask yourself what reading strategies are effective in academic discourse. Look at three suggestions by J. A. Mott-Smith et.al. (2017) below and try to apply them in your bachelor thesis!
Take notes of ideas which you consider to be the most important (in your own words, in points). It can be useful when you want to return back to sources (you don't have to read them twice, just look at the notes to recall what was the content about).
Underline or highlight key words and main ideas with which you want to operate.
Write one-sentence summaries for each paragraph and then use them to shape an argument.
Now when you studied your sources and prepared a plan about the structure of your work, you are certainly curious about how to transform all ideas into meaningful sentences and paragraphs. Let's see what are the main ways according to N.N. Spivey (1990):
choosing information depending on their importance, taking notes and highlighting parts which writers want to transform into paraphrases or quotes combined with their own experience and examples (e.g. "For this claim I want to state my own experience when...")
There are three types of organization:
1. weighting - focusing on an argument with the most weight
2. synthesis - formulating a hypothesis with different aspects
3. refutation - disproving arguments taking into account evidence from credible sources
matching writer's questions to the answers in research, comparing, combination and identification claims of different authors
But how to evaluate sources? How do I know which of them are credible?
The answer on this question we can find in the following videos:
In this video students can acquaint with identifiers of credibility which should be decisive in selecting sources: the author's credentials and knowledge base, a genre/type of a source, bias ...
This video shows main differences between reliable and unreliable sources, explains reliability of online sites and organizations with three URL's endings .edu, .gov., .org and describes why we should avoid Wikipedia.
Our tips: we offer you four websites where you can track information from credible sources!
Uloz.to
Project Gutenberg: Free eBooks
Directory of Open Access Jourals
Google Scholar
What about citations? How can I respond to them?
According to J. A. Mott-Smith et.al. (2017), there are five response strategies to citatations which you can use:
Questioning a point
Example: It is noteworthy that V. Uhlár (1980) claims that there is a soft pronunciation of "L" sound in Terchová. I wonder whether he thought everyday speech or folklore dialect, but as I have to speak for myself I have never heard a pronounced soft "L" sound in common laguage. But in folk music it can be possible.
Disagreeing with a point
Example: I consider it to be very strange that according to this research a common life of forefathers didn't influence folk music in Terchová. I'm convinced that it is not so.
Connecting a point to one's own life
Example: This publication claims that folklore elements are a part of old-fashionable clothes. I am not sure about that because me as also other people who I know follow fashion trends and there are many current t-shirts with folklore embroideries.
Responding to a powerful quote
Example: I appreciate that the author mentioned that because I also considered it to be an important idea.
Evaluating a claim
Example: I don't know whether it was right to express this idea because it sounds confrontational and it can unleash passions.
Reference list:
Bratcher, S. 1997. The Learning-to-write Process in Elementary Classrooms. 1st edition. London : Routledge, 1997. 244pp. ISBN 978-0805822557
Fisher, A. S. H.: Students’ reading techniques difficulties in recount text. In: Journal of English and Education. 2016. [cit. 2021-12-4]. Vol. 4. No. 2, pp. 1-12. URL: < https://ejournal.upi.edu/index.php/L-E/article/view/4627/3226>.
Mott-Smith, J. A. et al. 2017. Teaching Effective Source Use. Michigan : The University of Michigan Press, 2017. 208pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03689-9
Spivey, N. N. 1990. Transforming texts: Constructive processes in reading and writing. In: Written Communication. 7(2), 256-287pp.
videos:
Determing the Credibility of Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7FxhTQGZF0&t=31s
IELTS Reading - Skimming and Scanning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtcXr0_201A&t=266s
Improve Your Academic Writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLX7oyZB5Ng&t=64s
Reliable and Unreliable Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7LdLvzEQz4&t=134s
The Writing Process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGImUx4zg64