Proofreading and Writing

High school textbooks tell us that the writing process starts with a brainstorming technique and ends with proofreading. I doubt it's that simple in real writing. Writing is a complex process, and the steps we were taught long ago don't always do well for us as we develop as writers. In college, a friend once told me, "If you don't have an outline, you can't write." That's true to an extent -- for complex writing, you have to have an outline to keep ideas straight. That doesn't mean writers should be tied to an outline all the time, or that they should never break out of the lines of thinking they set up in that outline. The same goes for the proofreading step. Proofreading is even more organically linked to writing than outlining is. Writers don't have to wait until the end of the process to fix ugly or dry sentences. Still, there's something to be said for letting ideas sit for a while, and then coming back to them later to double-check for errors and omissions. In the final stages of writing, proofreading puts the polish on the apple, so to speak. But we should also be polishing and proofreading as we go, making use of the technology that allows us to wipe the slate clean and rearrange words and letters so easily.