Step 3: The best writing is rewriting
"The best writing is rewriting." E.B. White was right. The majority of the time you spend on a good piece should be on rewriting. This may be a radical break from the way you write English essays, but it's one skill that all writers must develop. The first step is to cut.If most of the writing process is rewriting, than most of rewriting is cutting things out. After you start doing the five-minutes-a-day routine and the practice of capturing ideas, you'll have plenty of material. Some of it will even be good. Most of it won't be. Cut words adjectives and adverbs that simply repeat what is implied in the word it is modifying (i.e. briskly ran, studious overachiever). Qualifiers often slip into writing subconsciously, even when they hamper the claims they are attached to. "I believe" and "It seems to me" should be the first to go. Then cut words from the "very" family like "rather", "pretty", and "quite". If you don't like the loss of precision in certain instances, you can always add the qualifiers back in, but out of conscious intent instead of subconscious habits.
Then work on the word order in sentences.
If a sentence seems to dangle near the end due to an excess of clauses that are necessary (since you haven't cut them out yet) but seem to have overstayed their welcome in the sentence, then rearrange them or split them into separate sentences.
Let's try that again.
Many sentences will contain clauses that, while too important to be cut, seem to have overstayed their welcome. Rearrange them or split them into separate sentences to give the sentence life again.
There.
In extreme cases, entire paragraphs will have to be cut. The sentences and paragraphs that give you the most trouble are usually ones that achieve a vague purpose or none at all. Cutting them out may seem like giving up on them, but no matter how much work you've put into a paragraph, the best improvement is the often simplest. No mercy allowed.
After cutting, the rewriter must reorganize, pushing around the words, sentences, and paragraphs into their proper places. This part is harder to develop a guide for since so much of it is based on intuition and personal style, which is probably why the infamous 5 paragraph essay is so popular with English teachers. It saves students the chore of actually thinking about organization, and it spares teachers the agony of reading through unorganized monstrosities. It's time to outgrow the boundaries of worried teachers and assume responsibility for organization.
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