What are the four stages of the writing process?

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The stages of the writing process ... they've been identified for a long time now. Haze and Flowers tried to address this in the 60s, 70s ... identify what are the stages that good writers go through. And in thinking that by identifying that, we could then think about what we needed the stages to teach students. And it's been modified over time, but everyone pretty much agrees that there are stages. In my work, I've come up with a very simple way of remembering the stages. It's "think," and that could be where you're brainstorming your own ideas or your gathering information from sources. Then "planning." So what's the structure? You have these ideas or this information about how are you going to organize them, plan your writing. Then you "write" and hopefully you follow the plan, and then you go back in and you "revise" it. Now, many students, especially those who struggle with writing, but even those who are good at writing, they just think you go right to the write stage, start writing, pour it all out.

And part of what we need to make sure we teach students — as part of explicit writing instruction — is that you can't skip the other stages. And in fact, you probably in total should spend more time at thinking and planning and revising than you actually do on the writing stage. The thing is, the more time you spend thinking and gathering information and getting your ideas out, and then planning how you're going to organize it, the better the writing ends up being. If you jump right into writing, it's missing all that organization. It's why many older students just write and write and write and write, and they never stop. There's no breaks, right? And the same is true with the revision stage. Now, if you're just writing like a quick write for something, you're writing a note to yourself, you're writing a text to somebody, that's a different story.

But most writing that's important, that we're using to learn or to communicate with somebody, we need to go through it at least one more time. We need to revise it. Now, as you get into the upper grades, revision gets more and more complex. There are so many different ways you can revise at the sentence level, you can add transition words, you can bring in missing information, and then you can also get into all the sort of proofreading and of revision. But folks think that that really can't happen until students are writing multiple paragraphs. But the fact of the matter is, even young children can begin to learn to revise their work. They can learn to work with peers to get input and feedback. A peer can say, "I don't understand this in your drawing or in your sentence." And so we can begin that whole emphasis on revision, but also on the thinking and on the planning as young as kindergarten of second or third grade.