Pre-Writing is a Revelation

The first unit of the course introduces students to what technical writing is and then jumps into the good stuff – the writing process. This post will focus specifically the first step of that process, pre-writing.

I have taken a writing course previously. It focused on the writing and revision processes. Revising is a key and necessary part of writing, but it is much, much easier if you have decent material to revise, and creating that original content has always been my struggle. The course overall was helpful for my writing but didn’t deal with some of my biggest flaws as a writer.

Previously, I would do a bit of brainstorming then struggle with writing what I wanted to say. After that I would spend ages rewriting to cut out information, put ideas in order and make it flow. My writing suffered from lack of organization and too much detail, and this wouldn't be addressed until the revision stage.

The process taught in this course, specifically the first step, does address this.

The writing technique has three steps:

1.  Pre-Writing
2.  Writing
3.  Rewriting

In essence the steps are figure out what you want to write and why, write it, then go back and fix it. As mentioned above, I’ve taken a course that worked on steps two and three so I am familiar with them. Also, a large part of my role as an EA involves revising others’ work so I have spent years reorganizing, rewriting and proof reading writing from people I support.

What I haven’t worked on before is the first step: pre-writing. As I’ve worked through several assignments I’ve found pre-writing to be revolutionary in how it affects my writing.

The pre-writing process essentially boils down to the following steps:

• Determine your motivation
• Identify your audience
• Identify why are you writing – to inform, instruct, persuade, build trust, etc.
• Determine what is the best channel to share that information
• Gather your data

For this post I came up with the following:

Motivation	External – I created the blog as an assignment for my writing class
Audience	1 – Course professor – she will be grading me on my work 2 – Friends and family – I want to keep them interested and participating
Purpose for writing	To inform and spark discussion
Best Channel	Blog – as ordained by the course instructor
Gather data	Brain storming and outlining

Establishing the above helped me to clarify what I wanted to write and how. I was originally debating reviving my old triathlon blog but quickly realized it would not be the appropriate channel. I then spent time brainstorming and outlining ideas for what I wanted to write. 

Over the course of a few days I brainstormed ideas and sketched out several outlines. This process highlighted my tendency to try to cover too much information in one go. I quickly realized what I wanted to write about was too much for one post. Reflecting back on my audience I knew I wanted to encourage busy people to read and comment so I needed to keep it short and to the point.

I took the ideas I had and broke them into two parts. The first part became my introductory post I shared on Monday and the second this one. Then it was a matter of reorganizing the data for each post and, finally, sitting down to write.

Writing and revising are a lot of work, the latter can and should take the bulk of your time, but it is far easier if you go into the writing step with goals, data and direction. Pre-writing is helping me to be more organized and to the point and saves me time in the later two stages.

To my writer friends and readers – what techniques do you use to get yourself started? I’m especially curious about the data gathering process – I generally stick to brainstorming and outlining. What do you use and why?