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Describing a Process or a Procedure
- Process: How something happens, takes place. Often uses Passive tenses
- Procedure: Giving Directions or Instructions. Usually in Active voice
Process
Describing a process means writing about how something is made or how something happens. Examples: the rainwater cycle, how coffee is grown, how glass is made, getting a driving license, starting a business.
Introduction
First, look at these introductory pages which give information on the Active and Passive voice and when they should be used.
- Layout of Process Essay
- More about the Passive
- Popcorn and Coffee: Passive and Active
- Using a Computer: Passive and Active
- Even more about the Active and Passive
- Exercise Sentences
- Changing a Tyre
- Exercise: Making Bread
- Expanding Your Essay: Adding Where or Why to each stage
- Gap-fill exercise Changing a tyre
- Process writing tips
Exercises with Resources, Videos, Background Information
Click for exercises on the following topics
- Orange Juice!
- Chocolate Manufacture
- Giving Blood - watch the video presentation
- Paper Manufacture
- How Olive Oil Is Made: Reading and Exercise with Chart (pdf Acrobat file: 267 kb). Also see this page
- Making Glass
- Fish Canning
- How a Photocopier Works
- How Crayons are Made
- How Letters are Sorted
- How Blocks are Made New!
- Fuel Cell Technology in Cars
- How to Demolish an Apartment Block
- Adding Memory To Your Computer
- The Use of Waterjets in Engineering
- Changing a Car Tyre
- Making Jellybeans
- Stanford
University site with processes
- Indigo and Tie-Dyed cloth from northern Guinea: a photo-story
- Popcorn
- How tabouleh is made + baba ganoush
- How the Pyramids were built: Past Tense and Passive
Other topics you could write about for practice:
- Getting a Driver's Licence
- How Cups are Made
- Petrol Refining
- How to Build a Runway
- How to . . .
- Getting Married in the UAE!
- Describe how to make Arabic coffee
- Describe how to get a passport
- How to Skin a Cat *
Useful Links for Passive and Process
- How Coca Cola is made
- How Ice Cream is made. A BBC page
- How Peanut Butter is made, from PeanutButterLovers.com
Two sites describing how Bread is made (the kind with yeast, not
flat Arabic bread)
- Botham & Co, UK Bakery site - step by step. They also have a more advanced site here
- Warburtons - a UK site, with pictures from a commercial bakery.
Vocabulary and Grammar for Writing About Process
Procedure
Under procedure, we will be writing about following and giving instructions and directions.
Click here for exercises and materials on Procedure
Back to Writing
* In
English, there are many ways to skin a cat. But basically, we put this here
just to see if anyone was reading this far.
See other idioms with the word 'cat' here: http://www.usingenglish.com/cgi-bin/search/search.pl?Terms=cat&Realm=Idioms&submit=Go
or here: http://www.goenglish.com/Index.asp (type 'cat' in the search box)