ABSTRACT
Writing can be seen as both a process and a product. Writing as a process involves initial drafting of ideas, revising and redrafting, incorporating new content that arise during the writing process, inserting new ideas as a result of feedback from a teacher or critical friend, dividing a complicated sentence into two or more sentences, combining two or more sentences into a single sentence by turning them into clauses and phrases, shifting sentences and even whole paragraphs around, and so on. In this chapter, we’ll describe and give examples of these different processes. The end result is a product: a report on the state of the economy, a set of instructions on how to conduct a science experiment, a short story, and a discussion on how to improve an academic essay. Beginning writers are often advised not to put a finger on the keyboard until their ideas have been thought through and formulated. This advice is misguided. Thinking and writing go hand in hand. It is through writing, and rewriting, that we discover what we think. In this chapter, we introduce two important concepts: register and genre. These are part of systemic-functional linguistics, the approach to language we have drawn on throughout this book.
