Welcome to The Writing Process!

In this step-by-step support area, you will find everything you need to know about writing a paper.

Have you ever received a writing assignment, thought “This won’t take long” and then stayed up all night writing the night before your assignment was due because it ended up taking a lot longer than you thought it would? If you have, you’re not alone. Many beginning writers struggle to plan well when it comes to a writing assignment, and this results in writing that is just not as good as it could be. When you wait until the last minute and fail to engage in a good writing process, you’re not doing your best work—even if you did “get all A’s in high school” as a procrastinator.

Research on writing tells us that the best thing writers can do to improve their writing is improve their writing process! With that in mind, this area of the Excelsior College Online Writing Lab is going to take you through the steps of a thorough writing process—one that involves many stages that will help you become a better writer.

You will learn about the recursive nature of the writing process, and you’ll be taken through each step of writing a paper with instruction, activities, and videos. With support for prewriting activities, you’ll learn how to generate and organize your ideas, and with support for paragraph building, you’ll learn how to turn those ideas into well-organized paragraphs. You’ll also learn about how rhetoric can help make your writing stronger, and you can even get some advice from fellow students about what to expect in college writing courses. If you’re writing a paper and need help with any of the steps along the way, The Writing Process area can help.