14 Writing a First Draft
Kathy Boylan
After completing Steps 1 and 2, you are ready to begin putting all parts and ideas together into a full length draft. It is important to remember that this is a first/rough draft, and the goal is to get all of your thoughts into writing, not generating a perfect draft. Do not get hung up with your language at this point; focus on the larger ideas and content instead.
Now that you have a topic and/or a working thesis (see “Developing a Strong, Clear Thesis Statement“), you have several options for how to begin writing a more complete draft.
Just write. You already have at least one focusing idea. Start there. What do you want to say about it? What connections can you make with it? If you have a working thesis, what points might you make that support that thesis?
Make an outline. Write your topic or thesis down and then jot down what points you might make that will flesh out that topic or support that thesis. These don’t have to be detailed. In fact, they don’t even have to be complete sentences (yet)! Organization is a very important part of this step, and if you have not already composed an outline or plan during Step 2, consider writing one now. The purpose of an outline is to create a logical flow of claims, evidence, and links before or during the drafting process. Experiment with outlines to learn when and how they can work for you.
Outlines are great at helping you organize your outside sources if you need to use some within a particular assignment. Start by generating a list of claims (or main ideas) to support your thesis and decide which source belongs with each idea, knowing that you may (and should) use your sources more than once, with more than one claim.
Begin with research. If this is an assignment that asks you to do research to support your points or to learn more about your topic, doing that research is an important early step (see “Finding Sources” in Let’s Get Writing). This might include a range of things, such as conducting an interview, creating and administering a survey, or locating articles on the Internet and in library databases.
Works Cited:
Eschholz, Paul and Alfred Rosa. Subject & Strategy: A Writer’s Reader. 11th ed., Bedford/St. Martin, 2007.
This chapter uses information from:
Successful Writing v. 1.0 which is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
The Word on College Reading and Writing by Carol Burnell, Jaime Wood, Monique Babin, Susan Pesznecker, and Nicole Rosevear which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
