The Five Stage Writing Process: An Overview

At the Writing Center, one of our best practices as writers and editors is to divide writing into stages: brainstorming, drafting, revision, editing, and proofreading.

The Five Stages of the Writing Process

BRAINSTORMING (AND RESEARCH) Brainstorming is the process of intentionally generating ideas for a piece of writing. Research is the process of locating materials to inspire and investigate ideas. You can brainstorm out loud, online, or on paper. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming!

DRAFTING Drafting involves beginning to write ideas down as sentences. The ideas may still be in development, and the sentences may be out of order or incomplete, but they’re there. Don’t worry too much about the quality of writing; developing your content is the goal here.

REVISION Revision is the process of changing your structure, organization, and ways of communicating your ideas. This could include moving paragraphs, restructuring content, or even re-drafting the writing so there’s a new main idea.

EDITING Editing is the process of refining your words and sentences. Revision looks at the piece as a whole, and how paragraphs fit together within it; editing examines what’s inside paragraphs, getting down to sentence level and word choice.

PROOFREADING Proofreading is best utilized when you feel that your writing is complete. It is simply the reviewing of punctuation, grammar, spelling, and formatting. Once this stage is completed, you’ve given the work your final stamp of approval.