Which Of The Following Occurs During The Second Phase Of The 3-x-3 Writing Process?

A Proven Writing Process to Defeat Writer's Block

Do these nine steps to achieve writing flow

Person typing on a laptop computer using the 3x3 writing process — Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Are you fed up with writer's block, and articles that take you forever to write? Today, you will learn about the 3×3 writing process and how to implement it into your daily writing workflow. If you desire a proven writing process that will help you become a more organized and productive writer, the 3x3 writing process will be of great value to you and your career.

The 3×3 writing process is compris e d of three major groups of three tasks. The major groups are Prewriting, Writing, and Revising. The three key tasks or steps under each group will be broken down with more detail later in this article.

Mastering the 3×3 writing process will help you:

Drill down on the purpose of your article
Determine your ideal reader/audience profile
Organize your thoughts and research
Write a final blog post or article draft that your readers will enjoy

Prewrite

The first thing to do is tackle all the necessary planning for your piece. Blogging without a plan can be like walking against a 100 mph wind. Thinking thoroughly about your article's purpose and intended reader will motivate you to write with the reader's benefit in mind. And this motivation will help the writing process go smoothly for your future writing projects.

Prewriting includes three sub tasks which are Analyze, Anticipate, and Adapt. Doing the brain work in this prewriting phase will help you turn your writing from mundane to meaningful.

Analyze

What is your big why or purpose for the article that you're planning to write? Starting with why is an excellent to gain perspective and direction for your article. In fact, it would be helpful if you had a list of common questions that you plan to answer on your blog or publication. With this in mind, your first step must be to analyze your purpose for writing your article.

Next, think about how your article will inspire or motivate your readers. What action do you want your reader to take after reading your post? Don't think about how to drive your reader to a buying or conversion decision at this step. Focus on how you want your receiver to take action for their benefit after reading your content. Provide value!

Now you need to decide on the best article format for your post. What is the best way to communicate your message? Here is a list of article types for you to consider at this stage:

List (or "listicle")
How-to / Tutorial
Review
Versus review (product / service comparison)
Expert round-up / Resource
Interview / Q&A
Feature / Spotlight
Checklist
Editorial / Opinion post
Recipe

Anticipate

The next step is to anticipate your audience and their specific profile. Knowing who you're writing to gives you direction for your writing task. You can do a deep reader profile exercise with specific information like age, occupation and gender, or you can keep it simple. For example, I anticipate that I'm writing to writers, bloggers, columnists, online marketers and internet entrepreneurs in this article.

Consider your audience's knowledge and experience level on the particular subject. You want to write slightly above the anticipated audience knowledge level so that you can exhibit expertise on the subject and help your reader grow.

Next, anticipate the type of emotional response that you want your reader to have. Do you want them to be inspired, relieved, motivated or thankful? Keep your anticipated reader response in mind while you write. Analyze your readers' responses to your article via emails, Medium responses, comments and/or social media messages to see if they align with your anticipated response(s).

Adapt

Now it's time to think about the language that you'll use to elicit the emotional response that you want. Prepare to adapt your language to accomplish this goal. Make a list of words that you will consider using within your article that will produce the reader response that you desire.

Decide on the writing style that you plan to employ at this stage of the 3×3 writing process. Determine whether your blog copy will be professional, conversational, whimsical, academic or some useful combination.

Write

Writing, the second group of 3x3 tasks, includes three sub tasks which are Research, Organize, and Compose. This is when you'll get all the ingredients you need to execute your writing plan for the article at hand.

Research

Gather information for your article. Unsurprisingly, Google search will be your best friend for doing research. Research the top three or four articles that you'll be competing against for Google ranking. Study what these articles do well and how you can improve upon them in your unique way.

The 3×3 writing process should come after you have conducted thorough keyword research for your article. Keyword research is the process of finding long tail keywords (keyword phrases of three words or longer) for which you will base your blog articles. Keyword research is what separates the pro bloggers from the amateurs.

Remember that research does not mean finding articles to copy from or scrape. This is unethical and it'll get you in some big trouble with Medium, Google, other search engines, and possibly the offended party's lawyers.

Your research should inspire your outline and challenge you to write amazing articles. Add the URL and word count for each of the articles you found to a post plan document, which is typically combined with my article outline document. Word count is important to note because you'd want to try your best to write more words than the top competing articles on Google. Write meaningful words and avoid fluff.

Search YouTube and Vimeo for videos that you can embed into your article. This can help improve dwell time (user reading time) for your article — a positive ranking signal for SEO.

Your research should also include your own content. Go through your older content to find articles to link to inside your new article. Search engines loves internal linking.

Organize

Outlining your articles before writing them is the secret to efficient and productive writing. Organize all of the major points and their sub points in your outline. Please don't skip this step. It's vital to writing with confidence and achieving flow.

Go through all your research and leverage your domain knowledge on the subject. You will find that your major points and sub points will likely become your headings and subheadings in your article's final draft.

Compose

Yes! It's time to start writing. Compose your article's zero draft at this step of the 3×3 writing process. Open a separate browser window with Google Docs (or your word processor of choice) and only a few other necessary tabs. This will help reduce distraction. The other tabs that you should have open are your article planner/outline and maybe one or two of the articles that you found during your research.

Do you remember all the good work that you did during the Prewriting stage? Now it's time to put all of that good stuff to use. Keep your article's purpose, desired emotional response, type/style, anticipated audience and your emotional words list top-of-mind at this step.

Just let the words flow in your zero draft. It's your zero draft (for your eyes only), not the final draft of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so don't stress yourself by trying to write perfect copy. And don't worry about perfect spelling or grammar. You'll clean it up at the revision step.

Revise

You're almost ready to present your hard work to your readers. But there's some cleaning up that you need to do first. Revising is the third and final group of tasks for the 3×3 writing process. Executing this group of tasks will take your blog articles from good to great…from zero draft to final draft. Revising includes three sub tasks which are Revise, Proofread, and Evaluate.

Revise

With being helpful by providing value understood, readability is the main goal for any kind of writing. Nothing else matters if your audience can't understand what they are reading! Revise your article for conciseness and readability during this crucial step.

The revision process should remedy the following issues in your article:

Run-on sentences
Wordy phrases
Superfluous modifiers
Long lead-ins for sentences (they usually end with "that" or "because")
Paragraphs that are too long (longer than 6 or 7 sentences)
Adverb overuse
Compound prepositions
Redundancies
Filler words and fluff

Concise language is easier to read than fluff. Also, readers are more likely to share articles that they can understand.

Use parallelism for more concise writing. Parallelism is two or more phrases or clauses in a sentence that have the same grammatical construction. Parallelism makes your sentences balanced. Parallelism makes your descriptors stand out. Parallelism makes your statements direct. But don't overdo it. :)

Use subheadings (H2 or H3 in WordPress) to break up your copy into organized sections. This will help your article's readability. Lastly, use numbered lists and bulleted lists to communicate information in a form that's easy to digest.

Proofread

Make a good impression on your readers with error-free copy. Proofread your article and clean up spelling and grammar issues at this step. Also, correct errors in names, numbers, and subject and verb agreement. Get a fresh set of eyes on your article if possible. Other people can see errors and offer good feedback because of their outside perspective.

Don't fully depend on your word processor's spelling and grammar check function. Software tools are useful, but they can't replace a keen human proofreader's eye. But if I were to recommend any grammar-checking technology, it would be Grammarly. Check it out.

Evaluate

Go back through the 3×3 writing process steps to see if you completed the tasks at every step. Consider the following questions after you've completed the first eight steps of the writing process:

Did you write your article with a clear purpose in mind?
Did you write for the right audience and use language that will connect with them?
Did your research efforts produce the right information for your article and did you disclose the sources for any statistics that you provided?
Will your article inspire, motivate and/or educate the reader and drive them to take action?
Did you choose the best article format for communicating the information?

Keyword research is mandatory

I touched on this earlier, but it must be reinforced. You must conduct thorough keyword research before you sit down and spend hours planning and writing an article with the 3×3 writing process. Writing for the optimum keywords based on your topic and website's domain authority (for blogs or websites other than Medium) will help your content get found through organic search. If you haven't done proper keyword research, get started by reading my SEMrush keyword research tutorial and Quora keyword research article after you finish this article.

Conclusion

Are you ready to implement this writing process and get results? Put the 3×3 writing process and thorough keyword research into your daily writing workflow today. It will greatly increase your writing productivity.

Like anything that's truly worthwhile, this process requires hard work and focus on the details. If you're willing to commit to the hard work and serving others, the 3x3 writing process will reward you.