3.Read and understand the text. Use the most appropriate textual aid in presenting the information. Write your answers on the activity notebook. The writing process has four distinct phases. The first is invention, which is aided by any number of techniques, including free-writing, mind-mapping and outlining. In this first stage, it's important for a writer not to edit but to let ideas flow and to simply get them down on paper. After invention, comes the first draft--the stage where the ideas start to take shape. Many writers use a sentence ou line at this stage to see where they need to cut and where they need to add material. The first draft is also where writers should develop a tentative thesis to guide the structure of their essay. The next stage of the process is when both the second and third drafts are done. Here, ideas and structure are refined, and the thesis is revised until it becomes the unifying idea of the paper. Finally, comes the last stage, that of editing. Writers should take care at this stage that all sentence structure and punctuation is correct, and they should make corrections to documentation format as needed. Writers often repeat these four phases more than once, or skip a phase and go back to it, making the writing process more cyclical than linear.​