How to Write a Rough Draft

In a rough draft, you get all your ideas on paper and flesh them out. You will add and delete material several times before you're satisfied that your work is complete and you're ready to write your final draft.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Preparing

1. Spend a little time brainstorming - generating ideas related to your topic - before beginning your rough draft. Write these ideas on a sheet of paper.
2. Organize your ideas by "clustering" them. Write each idea in the center of a page and circle it.
3. Arrange related ideas around each idea, trying to place ever-more-detailed pieces of information close to one another on the paper. This will give you some idea of how to structure your paper: if you find you have many ideas clustered in one area, you may want to focus there.
4. Make an informal paper outline to provide guidelines for the format and flow of your paper. At first, you can just list points in order. Later, you may want to arrange your information in standard outline form.
5. Do some brief, preliminary research. Consider which authors, books or quotations might offer you good supporting evidence. Save your in-depth research for draft revision.

Writing

6. Write your thesis statement and a summary of your paper's objective at the top of a clean sheet of paper. This will become your topic paragraph after revision.
7. Approach your rough draft in sections; there's no need to concern yourself with the overall flow of the paper just yet. Each section will be a paragraph or group of paragraphs in your final draft.
8. Start with the first item on your paper outline. Write the title of this item on a sheet of paper and write all relevant ideas beneath it. Though it's better to write in complete sentences at this point, if you must, leave sentence fragments in and revise later.
9. Write the title of the next item of your outline on a separate sheet of paper with all its relevant ideas beneath it.
10. Continue this process with all sections of the outline.
11. Tie together each item on your outline in a brief conclusion at the end of the draft. This will become the concluding paragraph after revision.

Tips & Warnings

• Feel free to skip from section to section as you see fit. If you find that one section is giving you difficulty, move on and come back to it later.
• Using a separate sheet of paper for each section allows for flexibility in the format of the paper ' you can use the first section as the final paragraph, or the last as the first. It also provides some extra room for additions and revisions.
• If you're typing your rough draft, consider triple-spacing it. This will give you extra space between lines to write in comments or revisions.
• After completing your rough draft, wait a while before returning to revise it, if possible. This will give you a fresh approach to the paper.
• Don't be afraid to change your thesis statement completely should your paper arrive at ideas different from those you began with. Writing is discovery.