Helping Students to See Writing as a Process

Many of the students we will see in The Writing Center are a part of the “Millennials” generation and beyond. Thus, according to Neil Howe and William Strauss, who wrote the book Millennials Rising, some of these young people have never done any of the following: they’ve never had to roll up a car window, they’ve never had to walk across the room to change the channel on a television, and they’ve never had to press the carriage return on a typewriter (24). Consequently, as writing instructors, we may have to work extra hard to convince these students that writing — unlike many facets of modern life — is not a one-step process. Instead, we may have to convince them that writing is a multi-step process, and in The Writing Center, we typically break that process down into seven steps.

One: Pre-Writing. The first step occurs when students come to The Writing Center and admit that they have the assignment, but they are unsure about how to proceed. Under those circumstances, we typically start with a conversation about the instructor’s expectations. For example, we help the students determine if the teacher wants a personal experience or an analysis of a reading assignment. In addition, we try to determine if the essay should be based on experience or on research and whether that essay should be informative or persuasive. Once the students have a pretty good idea of the…