Resources to Orient Students
and My Point of View as a Teacher

Go through an initial period of clarification, reflection, and invention. Read your assignment. Gather your thoughts. Get or go to your equipment -- legal pad or notebook or note cards, pens, typewriter, word processor, or whatever you need. Review your topic. Begin planning your paper.

Planning gives you an opportunity to put your ideas into an order appropriate to your assignment and readers. Drafting is when you begin to find the words that will suit the assignment and will be understandable and interesting for your readers.

In drafting you have an opportunity to shift your focus from generating new ideas and gathering further information to forging new relations among your ideas and information. Invention continues as you draft, and you will make further discoveries about your topic as you work.

As you begin your first draft, it will help you to keep in mind a number of helpful and practical pointers that are followed by seasoned writers when they begin drafting.

You can write a draft any time and any place, and writing can get done under surprising conditions. Drafting is likely to go best, however, if you choose a time and place ideally suited for sustained and thoughtful work.

Experienced writers indicate that it is best to be in a place where you can concentrate for a while without interruptions -- if you can find one. Many writers find a place where they write best, and they return to that place whenever they have to write. Try to find such a place for yourself.

Revision is easier when you compose on a word-processing typewriter or computer because you can add, delete, and move individual words of long passages without retyping. Be careful: it is so easy to revise on a computer that you might delete something you later want to use. To prevent loss of useful parts of your draft, simply number and save each version rather than too freely deleting. Then you can use windows to compare the different drafts, or print them out and compare your different versions.

If you don't use a word-processing machine or computer, you can make revising easier by writing on only one side of a page, by leaving wide margins, and by writing only on every second or third line of the page.

Divide the task into small parts. A long report or essay may seem like a lot to accomplish. So begin with some part of the essay -- a paragraph or a section -- at a time.

When you begin, just create. Remember that you are doing a draft. Be satisfied with less-than-perfect writing. Approach the draft as an exercise or experiment. Try things out. Later, you can go back and cross out a sentence or a section. Save the criticism until you have had time to create, time to put aside what you have created, and time to get some perspective on your draft.

Just write what comes to you rather than agonizing over sentences and paragraphs. If it is easier, start by writing an example, an anecdote, or an assertion first. If you have a lot of information, start with the part you understand best. If you get stuck at some spot, skip over it and go on to an easier part. Get started by doing the simple parts and you will gain momentum and motivation to move through the project.

Be smart by giving your ideas time to grow and change. People who put off getting started tell us that they get stressed and their work is rushed and late. An early start allows time for new insights about your topic to grow naturally. By starting early and with an easy part, writing is a more enjoyable process and produces a better result.

Keep on drafting even if you cannot think of just the right word, or if you have forgotten an important fact. You can search out the best word or find the precise fact later. If you don't remember how to spell a word, guess and keep going. Later, you can look it up in a dictionary. Inexperienced writers get bogged down and lose time by puzzling over spelling, or selecting a word, or trying to recall a specific fact. It is important to keep moving forward. This creates a base of writing on which you can build.

If you have reasonable goals, have not set your expectations too high, and do the easy parts first, then you can draft quickly. Say something like what you want to say and move on.

If you've started from notes, review them, make a plan or get a vision of where you want to go with them. Then put your notes aside. You can refer to them later to retrieve an exact quote or fact. Now and then, of course, you will want to reread what you have written, but no need to reread obsessively.

Keep drafting. Avoid editing or revising during this stage. There is no need to have everything exactly right in the draft. If you want to delete a phrase or sentence, or use your word processor's strike-out function, or save a copy before deleting, in case you want to use the phrase or sentence later.

Even when you do it the easy way, drafting is work. You may need to take a break to refresh yourself. But be careful not to wander off for too long so that you lose momentum. Set small goals and reward yourself regularly. That makes it easier to sustain the task of drafting until you have done enough of the writing to have a stable basis for completing the assignment.

You will find there is a point when you have passed through a "center of gravity" or achieved a "critical mass" in the written work on your project. It gains enough energy to attract more. It gets completed effectively and creatively. This may happen in a single burst of drafting, or it may happen during a second or third round of redrafting and revising, or even after the project has been allowed to sit for a few hours or overnight.

Writing is like making bread. There needs to be time for the dough to rise, then to be "punched down" by a process of revising, then to rise again.

You'll find all of this rewarding. Go through the whole process and you'll produce a "digestable" and nourishing paper. Good luck with all parts of this creative process!