1. “The pen is the tongue of the mind” -Miguel de Cervantes
Write Traits®
“The pen is the tongue of the mind”
-Miguel de Cervantes

2. The 6 Traits of Good Writing
Ideas
Organization
Voice
Word Choice
Sentence Fluency
Conventions
You will be learning how each trait changes slightly across genre to accommodate purpose and audience.

3. The Writing Process There are 4 main stages in the writing process:
Prewriting
Drafting
Revising
Editing
The 5th stage is Publishing, although not all pieces of writing reach this level.

4. Prewriting Finding a topic and narrowing it down.
The Writer is not concerned with whole sentences or paragraphs.
Find an idea and get it rolling.
This stage can also be called the brainstorming stage.

5. Drafting (Writing)
A rough draft or first draft is where your ideas come to life, and its messy.
Sentences and paragraphs take shape. You experiment with different words, leads, endings etc. A thesaurus is useful at this stage.
Writers can change directions, cross out words or sentences and draw arrows to link ideas that are not in order (sequence).

6. Revising Bringing a topic to focus.
Add or subtract single words or entire paragraphs.
It is helpful to put a rough piece of writing away for a few days before moving on to the next stage. This allows for a fresh look and sharper focus on the details of the story.
Writers notebooks are important for storing rough drafts (quick Writes) and ideas.

7. Editing Making writing more readable; fine tuning.
Punctuation, capitalization, grammar, and paragraphing are the main focus.
The use of dictionaries, spell checks and proofreading is important at this stage.

8. Publishing
Not every piece of writing reaches this stage (Jane Baskwill).
When writing is going to be put on display as finished work it must be carefully selected as a piece of writing that has truly experienced all the stages of the writing process.