Rough draft outline how to#

Who would want to do that again? Writing a rough draft helps you get your ideas on paper. While you may have managed to write an essay off the cuff in the past, it was bound to be a stressful experience. Writing a rough draft also helps build discipline. But before that, you need to start somewhere. Once you have your rough draft, you can edit and polish ad nauseum until you have your wonderful final draft. When you start a rough draft, you are no longer just thinking about writing or planning on writing-you are doing it! Writing your rough draft helps you get your information and thoughts on paper. A rough draft is a means of getting started on your essay.

Rough draft outline how to#

You have done the research, and you know what you want to say, so what is wrong with just writing? Nothing! In fact, that’s exactly how to write a rough draft. You may think that rough drafts are not important. Just as grouping similar puzzle pieces can give you an idea of what the final puzzle will look like, grouping your ideas in a rough draft gives you an idea of what your final draft will look like. When you write your rough draft, you begin organizing how these ideas go together. Your outline and your research are a collection of ideas similar to that jumble of puzzle pieces. Writing a rough draft is similar to building a puzzle. But looking at the pieces, you can get an idea of how they will all fit together. It is likely that the jumble of puzzle pieces in no way resembles the picture on the puzzle box. Have you ever assembled a puzzle? Most of us begin by dumping all the puzzle pieces out of the box and then grouping the pieces by color and shape. But what exactly is a rough draft? And just why do you need to write one in the first place? You turn on your computer, poise your fingers over the keyboard, and begin your rough draft. You are ahead of the deadline, and you want to stay that way. So hopefully all of these things will help you in that drafting process and get you to that final draft a little bit easier.You have done the research and written the outline of your paper. Really open your ears to what they are saying. Ultimately, you make the final choices when it comes to your writing. So, welcome feedback, ask people to look at it, but don't get angry if they say things that you don't agree with. And then finally, welcome the feedback from everybody but remember, you're the writer. It's amazing what it'll do for you to take maybe a day away from a paper, and then sit down, go back to it and look at it with fresh eyes. My other advise is take breaks and that's another reason why I say give yourself some time in the drafting process. So it's always nice to get that feedback. When somebody else reads it and it's not very clear at all. Often times we get so in our papers that we think we're being clear. It's going to give you an idea of what it is that you're communicating. Not just your teacher, not just you, but asking a friend, asking a parent, asking a different teacher who didn't assign it, to look at it. So, in the drafting process, and hopefully you'll have multiple draft, it's always good to get multiple different people to look at it. That brings me to getting a different set of eyes on your papers. And sometimes the best thing to do, is to just skip over it, keep going with something else and then come back to it with some fresh eye.

When it comes to drafting, I definitely advise sitting down more than the night before papers do, because sometimes you will get stuck on your hook for your introduction, or maybe how to analyze a particular quote. If you get stuck, move on and come back later, and this is really important. So writing it shouldn't be the hard work. You won't believe how many students do their outline, they plan everything out and then they sit down at their computer and say, 'I don't know what to write here.' And then I have to remind them, 'Get out that outline.' That is all the thinking that goes into your essay. The other thing I have remind my students is, remember your outline. You can go back to it and you can pair things back later. But if your page limit is three pages and your rough draft is four, let it go. Of course, you don't want to write a 20 page rough draft, if your page limit is three pages. The first is, don't worry about length, at least not too much.

There are some things I tell my students to keep in mind, when they sit down to actually draft. Now I know that sometimes it's hard because you do your outline, you prep your thesis statement, you've done all this thinking that goes into it, and then your teacher probably just says right.