My Pre-Writing Analysis

I generally begin my pre-writing with a healthy dose of procrastination, much like what I am doing right at this very moment. This is unfortunately due to an inherent flaw in my psyche, a crack in my foundation if you will, so there’s not much I can really do about it. I love pre-writing because I get to procrastinate on the actual writing portion by spending a ridiculous amount time on researching and building my outlines.

Contrary to what you might think, my prewriting actually tends to be highly organized. I’m quite scatterbrained, so if I don’t have a freakishly mechanical outline it will be a lot harder for me to formulate my ideas further down the line. What I’ll do is have two documents open at the same time: one a nice outline with some classy bullet points, the other a disorganized hodgepodge of links, quotes, and incomprehensible sentence fragments. Somehow, those synthesize and form a workable piece of writing. I much prefer making my notes digitally opposed to taking them on paper. The finality of writing things down physically means that I end up deliberating for far too long over my choice of words, which really slows me down.

Researching is truly like crack for me. Nothing compares to the high of having open such an absurd

I have a whole in depth annotated bibliography set up, and it’s several pages longer than the finished essay is supposed to be, which says a lot about the amount of effort I put into this stage versus the actual writing part. To me, it’s more important to take my time and develop a solid working knowledge of the material than it is to rush through the prewriting stage in the hopes of churning out an passable essay as quickly as