How people write

Understanding how people write, can be of great help to teachers who teach writing as a skill. The knowledge of a writing process will give teachers more confidence in making their lessons better organised and easier for their students to learn.

When people write, they write in different stages.

First, before they write, they try and decide what they are going to write. They often think about the purpose of their writing. The purpose will help them to choose relevant types of text, and appropriate language. They also think of the audience they are writing for - who they write for. This is important, too, because know who they write for will help them decide how they structure their writing and what language they will use. Moreover, they need to think about the content structure or how they organise ideas or facts they want to include in their writing.

Next, they write the first draft. When they finish the first draft, they usually read through what they have written to see what works and what doesn't. Then they revise what doesn't work well.

Once they have edited their draft, changing what they consider is necessary, they produce the final draft, which is ready for their readers to read.
The whole process can be like this:

planning
 ↓
drafting
↓
editing
↓
final draft

Remember the process is not straightforward, but recursive. It means writers plan, draft and edit and then they re-plan, re-draft and re-edit throughout the process.

With different writing purposes in minds, writers use different text types or genres. Becoming familiar with these different types is very important because not every text type is the same; different text types require different text structures and different choices of language.

Different purposes,
different genres

Here are the main different text types used in Tieng Anh 10 with their own features. Understanding these features can help teachers to plan better content for their writing lessons.
 

Text types	Examples	Features
Letters	-complaint	-language: formal -logical ordering of ideas
	-confirmation -invitation -acceptance & refusal -giving directions	-language: informal -logical ordering of ideas
Narrative	-routines -people's background -profile -instructions	-language: Informal -time ordering of facts
Description	-a film -a city	-language: friendly, descriptive -place /time or generalisation- to -specific ordering of ideas
Expository (Explaining)	-advantages & disadvantages of computers -charts & tables	-language: formal -generalisation-tospecific ordering of ideas or facts

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