For the past three decades, research has identified three key pillars for improving writing: self-regulation, understanding writing as a process, and recognizing the connections between reading and writing. Reading provides writers with knowledge about text types, genres, and how skilled writers compose and structure texts to suit specific purposes. Additionally, understanding writing as a process equips writers with essential steps for producing quality texts, including planning, drafting, revising, and publishing. Above all, self-regulation plays a pivotal role in fostering autonomy and independence in writing.

This study examined the perspectives of Education College students regarding a proposed writing strategy they practiced during a writing course. The strategy integrates the three aforementioned components—self-regulation, writing processes, and reading-writing connections—and involves five core steps: reading, planning, drafting, revising, and publishing. A purposive sample of 58 students (40 females and 18 males) participated in the study. Their views on the strategy and its individual steps were collected through a questionnaire and end-of-course written reflections.

The results indicated that 92% of participants emphasized the importance of the reading step, 88.5% valued planning, and 89.5% highlighted the significance of drafting. Similarly, 72% acknowledged the importance of revising, and an equal proportion (72%) recognized the value of publishing. Furthermore, 93% of participants noted the overall strategy's effectiveness in enhancing explanatory text writing, while 89.5% and 88% reported improvements in narrative and persuasive text writing, respectively.

Thematic analysis of the written reflections demonstrated that the strategy significantly contributed to improving the organization and quality of students’ writing by promoting writing as a structured process.

The study recommends adopting this strategy as a pedagogical approach for teaching and learning explanatory, narrative, and persuasive texts. The strategy aligns with research findings on self-regulation, the writing process, its relationship to reading, and the writer's knowledge of text characteristics and indicators.

Keywords: Writing strategy, explanatory text, narrative text, persuasive text, university students.