Writing Process

The concept of writing is a process that causes difficulty in some individuals and ease in others.  Writing has always been a form of therapy in my life.  As a young girl, memories of far away places and deep dark secrets saturated my journals.  As a young adult, writing helped me find out what really matter and what needed to be changed.  It was not until, I was force to look at my writing in a professional manner did my writing become sterile and without passion.  Writing for leisure gives an individual a blank easel to create stories of endless delight while writing professionally offers a map of carefully directed routes. 

Writing  for a classroom assignment may cause stress.  It could also create a block in the flow of ideas.  I have experienced both.  Leisure writing is simple with no rules or the grammatical barb wire that is expected in most professional papers.  For this reason, I have had to develop ways to enhance my writing in a manner that will satisfy the requirements of administration, college professors and colleagues.

Developing an outline prior to actually beginning to write, helps me keep my writing in focus.  It makes me stay on the write path and fulfill the requisite of the assignment.This type of strategy can be used in the Writing Center with those students who tend to write and write and not say anything.  Professional writing requires focus on a specific idea and writing an outline can achieve this.

My first language is Spanish and as many of you know, our language in many areas reverses the order of grammatical correctness in English.  To make sure my thoughts don't lose their meaning in the translation from Spanish to English, I read and reread my papers aloud.  I listen to my voice as I read and pick out the sentence structures that do not make sense.  Reading aloud allows the reader to invoke more of their senses.  This technique will help a bilingual student pick out grammatical errors easier.  Another area of importance is respecting the culture of our clients.

Many cultures have different ideas about topics depending on their life experiences.  What makes sense to one might be totally bizarre to another.  For this reason asking open ended question and listening to the writer will help the reader, in this case us, to better understand the writers point of view.  I feel that by acknowledging the writer ability to create a professional essay will give the writer a sense of accomplishment causing him or her to want to better their writing.  Cultivating good writers should be an added benefit to working in the Writing Center.  I hope to be able to do this.