Have you ever tried to bake a cake? Whether you bake a cake from scratch or use a boxed recipe, cakes take a lot of work! From finding and measuring out the ingredients to mixing them together to putting the batter in the oven, cakes take time, patience, and work to make. Writing is similar to the process of baking a cake. Whether it be a poem for your creative writing class, a research paper for your core history class, or even an academic showcase, all forms of writing require these three main ingredients: time, patience, and work. By comparing the process of baking a cake to writing, we can understand the importance of each step in the writing process.
Step 1: Gather your ingredients. Ingredients for cakes may include eggs, flour, and sugar, but ingredients for our papers may include a main idea/argument, a thesis, two body paragraphs, supporting evidence, and a conclusion. Sometimes, the ingredients might be a little different depending on what kind of cake we are baking or what kind of writing we are completing, but that is okay! Just be sure you pay close attention to the recipe and assignment prompt to know what ingredients you will need. When combined, the ingredients for a cake create that spongy goodness we all love, and the ingredients for the paper create an outline for a well-rounded idea or argument.
Step 2: Combine ingredients and bake. After mixing your ingredients together, you put the mixture into an oven. For our writing, this is where we write the final main ideas of our paper and finish our rough draft. At this point, our cake is not decorated and our papers may not have many details, but we have the foundation for adding those details later.
Step 3: Let cool. When you take your cake out of the oven, you have to let the cake sit and cool before you take it out. Otherwise, the cake might collapse and fall apart. When it sits, the cake is allowed to become one solidified unit. We can apply this concept to our writing as well! Sometimes, our writing needs to sit for a day or two in our minds before we begin to edit. We might think to ourselves, “What do I need to possibly change? Are there any necessary ideas I forgot?” That way, we can plan what we will do next.
Step 4: Apply the crumb coat. Now that our cake is out of the oven and our rough drafts are done, it is time to focus on the crumb coat. A crumb coat is when we first frost our cake and the frosting has specks of cake crumbs in it requiring touch-ups. Similarly, in our rough drafts, we may notice organizational issues, ideas that need strengthening, or flaws within the thesis. While addressing these issues may be messy as we move things around and delete or add information, it is necessary to ‘clean up’ our papers and adjust as needed.
Step 5: Decorate. As we add the final touches to our cake, we can add final touches to our papers. This step will help ensure we fine-tune any lingering issues such as weak sentence structure, poor, word choice, and grammatical errors. While decorating cakes may involve frosting, sprinkles, and candles, final touches for writing include using Grammarly (an online site that identifies grammatical errors within your paper), a thesaurus (helpful for finding synonyms and antonyms), the Purdue OWL (an online website that has explanations and guides for various writing strategies), and handouts from our own Writing Studio here at Concordia University Irvine.
Step 6: Enjoy! Now that our cake is done and we have finished our papers, it is time to eat and relax! The writing process is very similar to baking as there are necessary steps to consider as we transfer our ideas from brain to paper. While some liberties may be taken, having a guideline to follow is always helpful. By having a guideline, you can ensure that your writing goes through various stages to continually develop and mature. Remember, writing is a multi-step process involving both work and time, but it can also be fun and enjoyable. Just like eating a good piece of cake.
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Ingrid Becker is a senior at Concordia University Irvine. She is majoring in liberal studies, elementary education with a concentration in Christ College. As an avid procrastinator, she is often reading (her favorite book is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë!), hanging out with her friends, grabbing some boba, or going on spontaneous adventures. Writing has always been a passion of hers, and her love for writing led her to join Concordia’s speech team. It gives her great joy to be able to write about and perform topics that are of importance to her. She has experience working with MLA, APA, and CMS formats. She loves tackling papers head on like she’s heading into a battle, so she is here to assist students in any way that she can!