ENC 1101: Written Communications
September 23, 2012
My own summarization of, “Writing Drafts”, By Richard Marius This article is about Richard Marius and the processes he uses in his own writings. He expresses the importance of starting with just a list, committing yourself completely to the project at hand, writing numerous rough drafts, and many other guidelines that can contribute to the process of effective writing. A simple list is the first step to writing the first draft of anything. In the past, I was always told that writing a completely specific and organized outline was the correct way of starting a writing assignment. My last English teacher even made us turn our outlines in with our essays. According to the article, a …show more content…

I found it very insightful that he admitted that while, this is his way of doing it and it is one of the best ways, it still might not be the right way for me or someone else. He gives several examples of other writers he knows that have extremely different writing processes. He tells of a friend of his whose “writing process consists of writing a sentence, agonizing over it, walking around the room, thinking, sitting down, and writing the next sentence.”(Marius paragraph 13) Then he tells a story about William Faulkner, who wrote the outline of one of his world famous books on a wall in his house. I think it just makes me feel better to know that just because I don’t sit down and write the exact way my teachers have always told me to or the way that Richard Marius tells me to, does not mean that I am wrong. I just have a different process from some writers. Not to mention, if someone as recognized and celebrated in the literary community as William Faulkner, had such an unusual process, then mine cannot be that bad, just unique. I completely understood what he meant by saying, “think of writing as a process making its way toward a product-sometimes painfully.” I remember the last time I took a writing class, it was in high school, and my teacher gave us a writing assignment that was practically impossible. She made it almost impossible on purpose, just to see if we would start out with the outline and how far we would go with our research. Everyone had their own