Owning Your Process

Throughout this section of Reading and Writing Successfully in College, I have reminded you to find processes that work for you. There is no one “right” or “best” process; there are only processes that work for you.

Good writers are flexible writers. They have their usual methods for producing good final products, but they also find that sometimes techniques that have worked before no longer help. Successful writers know how to try a different approach when a process stops working.

Successful writers also recognize that different writing tasks can require different processes. The process that I used for this textbook is very different from the process I used, for example, in composing the emails I sent out today.

Good process doesn’t stop after college, either. If your professional work requires writing at all, you’ll want to keep refining and adjusting your processes so that you can be successful in those settings, too.