Structuring your writing process: 6 stages to produce more coherent papers

The paper writing process comes in six stages: researching, prewriting, drafting, copy-editing, mechanical editing, and revising. By learning to recognise these, you can plan your process more effectively and avoid common pitfalls such as irrelevant side-quests and the perfect sentence vortex.

Ever found yourself happy with a beautiful piece of text, only to find it didn’t fit with the rest of the paper? Or got yourself stuck in a perfect sentence vortex, writing and polishing one sentence at a time? Chances are your writing process could do with more structure. Because writing, just like any other activity, can be done in optimal and suboptimal ways.

Why does the writing process often lack structure?

Writing a scientific paper is a mammoth task that doesn’t always get taught properly. Beginner advice tends to centre around the IMRAD structure (Intro, Methods, Results and Discussion), but often doesn’t explain how to get there. At the same time, academic writing courses often focus on specific aspects of writing such as paragraph structure or improving your scientific vocabulary.

It doesn’t help that the different stages of writing are tricky all look the same: sitting at a desk and typing away. It’s different from, for example, cooking, where chopping, boiling, and grilling are all distinct tasks that require different gear. But not to worry. Recognising the stages of writing gets easier with practice.

Six stages of scientific writing

Writing can be structured into about six stages: researching, prewriting, drafting, revising, copy-editing, and mechanical editing (how many stages there are exactly depends a bit on who you ask. For example, this university‘s writing center recommends six stages, while academic and educator Katherine Firth lists four).

1. Researching includes finding relevant literature, collecting data (experimenting, field work, etc.), and analysing the data. It’s debatable if researching should be defined as part of writing, but without it you certainly can’t write anything: without a proper data analysis it’s tough to draw reliable conclusions, and if you’ve overlooked part of the literature, you’ll have to go back.
   
   
2. Prewriting is the next biggest and most important part of writing. It will take long and can feel like you’re not productive at all, while it’s actually THE MOST PRODUCTIVE stage. It includes thinking and making sense of your findings, and laying those out in a logical order so that you can roughly explain why the research question is relevant, how it is answered, what the answer is and what that means for science or society.
   This stage includes ‘chaotic’ techniques such as mindmapping and freewriting, but also less chaotic techniques such as note-taking and outlining.
   
   
3. Drafting is getting thoughts on paper in a somewhat organised fashion. At this stage you are writing for an (imaginary) audience, so you have to make sure they can follow your train of thought. The quality of writing (spelling or grammar mistakes, clunky sentences, references that don’t follow any formatting) does not matter so much at this point. Speaking from experience, it does help if you can still understand what you wrote three months from now 😉
   
   
4. Revising is similar to prewriting, but now you have something to work with. Revising is done by either yourself (usually after a break, so you have fresh eyes), supervisors, co-authors or reviewers and will probably happen a few times in the writing cycle. In scientific writing this stage is called revising, but I find the distinction made by editing services quite helpful: during content editing (a.k.a. developmental or substantive editing) you make sure that the content makes sense: the arguments are logically built, it’s clear what the research question is and why it should be answered, etc. Structural editing is closely linked to content editing and makes sure that the paper has a logical flow: there is cohesion between arguments and items that belong to one topic are placed together.
   
   
5. Copy-editing is where you get to make your writing shine. It’s a time to make sentences flow nicely, use clear and precise wording, and create an overall great reading experience for your audience. Initial drafts require less copy-editing than a manuscript ready to submit to a journal.
   
   
6. Mechanical editing, also known as proofreading, is fixing the details like spelling, grammar, punctuation, abbreviations, citations, and formatting to the style guide of the journal. This type of editing is also done by the journal when they prepare the proofs.

Common pitfalls

Looking at these writing stages, you may recognise some common pitfalls:

• Not enough time spent prewriting, leading to e.g. a disjointed paper with an unfocused story or irrelevant side-quests.
• Too much prewriting; overthinking (usually focused on what’s wrong or missing).
• Too much copy-editing; i.e. the perfect sentence vortex.
• Not enough time copy-editing, which leads to wordy sentences or incoherent paragraphs.
• NOT ENOUGH BREAKS. Ok, to be fair, I didn’t list this, but it’s important to take breaks between these stages. It’s impossible to revise a text that you just finished drafting.

How to apply these stages?

Recognising these stages helps to decide what to do next. Do you need to draft more, fix your outline, or is it time to start copy-editing?

To structure your own writing process, find out what these stages look like for you. Maybe you prefer to combine copy-editing and mechanical editing. Or maybe you use different techniques to prewrite, like pondering your findings in the local park, or presenting your work at a conference.

A lot of people use writing to think, which can make it difficult to distinguish prewriting from drafting. Here’s a few ways to identify whether you’re prewriting or drafting:

• Are you writing for yourself (prewriting) or for an audience (drafting)?
• Are you following an outline (drafting) or jotting things down (prewriting)?
• Are you generating ideas (prewriting) or shaping them into something readable (drafting)?
• Does it feel annoying to follow an outline and kind of like your thoughts are trying to ‘escape’ this rigid structure? You’re probably prewriting (or the outline needs an update).

Maybe you like to do all your prewriting in your head and draft all at once. Also fine! There is not one perfect way. Do what works best for you.