7f Create a draft.

No matter how good your planning, investigating, and organizing have been, chances are you will need to do more work as you draft. This fact of life leads to the first principle of successful drafting: be flexible. If you see that your plan is not working, don’t hesitate to alter it. If some information now seems irrelevant, leave it out—even if you went to great lengths to obtain it. Throughout the drafting process, you may need to refer to points you have already written about. You may learn that you need to do more research, that your whole thesis must be reshaped, or that your topic is still too broad and should be narrowed further. Very often you will continue planning, investigating, and organizing throughout the writing process.

Drafting

AT A GLANCE

  • Set up a computer folder or file for your essay. Give the file a clear and relevant name, and save to it often. Number your drafts. If you decide to try a new direction, save the file as a new draft—you can always pick up with a previous one if the new version doesn’t work out.
  • Have all your information close at hand and arranged according to your organizational plan. Stopping to search for a piece of information can break your concentration or distract you.
  • Try to write in stretches of at least thirty minutes. Writing can provide momentum, and once you get going, the task becomes easier.
  • Don’t let small questions bog you down. Just make a note of them in brackets—or in all caps—or make a tentative decision and move on.
  • Remember that first drafts aren’t perfect. Concentrate on getting all your ideas down, and don’t worry about anything else.
  • Stop writing at a place where you know exactly what will come next. Doing so will help you start easily when you return to the draft.

Watch and respond to the video You just have to start.