making writing meaningful!

Finally a chapter I can relate to! I must say being a non-English major I thought blogging, writing long papers for this class and reading these books would be challenging for me since we as Finance majors only focus on statistics and formula. But gradually reading these books made me realise how strictly I follow these theories by Williams and/or Elbow in my everyday life even if I am writing a Finance paper on stock valuation!
I just have to add that I simple love the process approach. There does not really have to be so many stages in my opinion but one can work around to add or subtract a stage.
The first stage invention is of course where we need to start, the book gives us a lot of invention activities but personally I go for freewriting, discussion and brainstorming. We all know the benefits of freewriting we have read enough chapters by elbow to know how effective it can be. Brainstorming or outlining is helpful too, but one must remember that outlining does not mean writing in details. We are just supposed to jot down some important points that we may use in the paper. One of the most effective activity from the teacher and even the student's perspective would be discussion. Just like freewriting it helps generate excellent ideas for any topic. As a past tutor for Eng 015 myself I have seen the results of a good discussion on papers. And they are usually positive. The idea is to generate students in these discussions and help them form their ideas into concrete ones.
The Discussion checklist on page 109 pretty much covers everything a teacher should focus on from what I have learned. I am not a fond of talk-writing myself because it takes me forever to come up with something meaningful and presenting my initial plans would not do me much good I suppose but discussing with the class and teachers is definitely a start.
Planning is probably more time confusing and frustrating especially at the initial stage. I think when we make the initial plan we should focus on a few simple questions: Who is the audience,? What is my thesis?and How I can support my thesis. The conclusion can come later. I know some people are not a fan of planning but again this process can be personalized to suit each individual. The most important stage for me and it has always worked out for me is the Drafting. I cannot stress enough on the importance of drafting. For me drafting pretty much takes care of all the other stages. For any paper long or short I produce at least three drafts. And I can guarantee you that my paper only improves with each draft. It is that effective! After drafting there has to be workshops, it is most important to share views with different people and different opinion. When we write we write from a writer's perspective, but what we forget is that we are writing for the "readers." Therefore, we need readers' opinion to improve the paper. I have never really done pausing and reading, personally to save time I would skip that stage for my papers. And also because I have a lot of confidence on the "drafting stage," where I can focus on things like audience and punctuation. Revising and Editing is usually one step for but if someone wants to split them, then its even better. Needless to say and I think everyone knows revising and editing is vital for any paper. We need to be critical editors and unbiased readers with our papers to attain maximum efficiency. Editing can be difficult as William states in chapter 3, because we are simply not taught to edit as students. The problem I face with the most is spotting errors in my own work as I tend to focus on the content rather than form.
I know that this stage model can become very formulated, but like I said before one can edit the stages according to their preference and comfort. But to say that a phase model is better than this stage model may be taking it too far. I do not even know what this phase model is about and it certainly does not make sense to me.
I have not been exposed to any of the activities to improve writing that has been mentioned in the chapter. But emailing pen pals seem like the most fun and helpful to me. The only thing I can probably relate to is writing these blogs for this Eng 470 class. The whole point is to keep students writing and having them interact with pen pals and/or bloggers can help them experience a better educational experience. I know the blogs are helping me each week to develop my writing skills! I think this is so far the most I have written for the blogging assignment! Now I am starting to see what Dr. Kearney meant when she said she wants us to practice writing every week, just to get us in the habit of writing regularly. It will only help us in the long run.