Once you’ve settled on a main idea and sketched some sort of outline (or wireframe or storyboard), you’ll need to gather and select the content that will best support that main idea. This is a good time to take another look at the assignment. Reread the requirements and the prompt(s) to which you’re responding.
There’s nothing magical about drafting. It takes time, of course, and it helps to have notes about your main idea, your evidence, and your organization close by. Successful drafters ask, anticipate, and respond to questions as they work through a draft, whether they realize it or not. A writer who is composing an instructional booklet may ask, for example, How do people learn something new? or How did I learn to do what I’m trying to describe?
Think about creating a multimodal document that teaches people how to plant trees. Your main idea might be “A healthy tree starts with a proper planting.” You know your audience will want to know what constitutes “a proper planting.” You decide there are steps, but how many steps? What’s the first step? Once you start fleshing out the steps—considering the climate, assessing how the roots are contained, digging the hole—you need to anticipate and respond to questions at each step: How big should the hole be? How deep? Why? How is the root ball set in? During your drafting, you might even ask which of the steps need illustrations or photos to complete the teaching or, in other words, to fulfill your purpose for your audience.
When you’re composing a text that is less concrete—an interpretation or analysis, perhaps—you might find that questioning helps you get from a rough outline to full paragraphs. One student was assigned to write an interpretation of song lyrics or a poem of his choice. The assignment also included a requirement that students illustrate some part of the song or poem. The student chose the song “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People, listened to the song and read through the lyrics numerous times, brainstormed some ideas that focused on the song’s main character, and wrote a rough outline.
rough outline
Interpretation of “Pumped Up Kicks”
Main idea: If the song is Robert’s “story,” is there any way he, who shoots and murders peers, can be seen as a sympathetic character? Close, but no.
The student was comfortable enough with his main idea and proceeded to draft an introduction focusing on what makes a character sympathetic. The following shows how he went about developing a paragraph from the first point in his rough outline.
| point in the rough outline | the composer’s questions | draft paragraph |
| Robert is alone and lonely, and that’s something the audience can understand and maybe relate to. |
How can I tell Robert is alone? Where do I see this in the lyrics? Does alone = lonely? |
The lyrics show us a boy, a “kid,” whose “Daddy works a long day” and who spends the day unsupervised. Robert is alone in his house and alone in his thoughts as he spends idle time digging in “his dad’s closet” and trying his father’s cigarettes. There’s not really a hint of any kind of relationship (at least a positive relationship) in the story. |
| Do I care? Does his loneliness make him sympathetic? | The father comes “home late,” probably repeatedly, and Robert is left waiting “for a long time.” There doesn’t seem to be a mother figure or siblings. Even if we can’t relate to Robert, maybe we can understand his actions as being the result of an unloving home environment. His being alone and lonely generates sympathy. |
As the student moves from outline to draft, he successfully identifies evidence from the lyrics to support his point. He still needs to consider images that might help him communicate his analysis of the lyrics. After all, his assignment asks him to illustrate a part of the poem or lyrics. He’s off to a good start, however.
When you proceed from your ideas and notes to full sentences and strings of ideas, keep in mind that a draft is flexible. The goal is to get something down on paper that makes some sense and can be played with and questioned later by you, a peer, or another reader. It helps to ask, anticipate, and respond to questions you have or your reader might have. And of course it helps to keep your purpose for writing and your audience in mind as you draft.