Before she committed class time to teaching various approaches to the writing process, an instructor in a developmental writing course wanted to find out how her students were writing. Specifically. she wanted to know whether they were using prewriting strategies such as “free writing.” “self – questioning.” and “brainstorming” and whether they were writing more than one draft of their wetly assignments. Therefore. She asked her students to do a Process Analysis on their first weekly essay. She directed them to keep a simple record of the steps they took in preparing the essay and, after they had finished, to comment briefly on how useful each step had been in getting the assignment done.