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.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Dictionaries
• Thesauri
• Notebooks
• Writing Pens
• Word-processing Software
• Notebooks

Writing

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Write the title of the next item of your outline on a separate sheet of paper with all its relevant ideas beneath it.

5. Continue this process with all sections of the outline.

6. 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.

Preparing

7. Spend a little time brainstorming - generating ideas related to your topic - before beginning your rough draft. Write these ideas on a sheet of paper.

8. Organize your ideas by "clustering" them. Write each idea in the center of a page and circle it.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

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.

[theperfectfit]

on 1/13/2009 I would like to know how many people write the first draft on the computer vs. by hand? I rough everything out by hand, cut the sections apart with scissors, and reorganize it before I go to the computer. I do an untold amount of editing before I submit the final paper or article. I want every word and every phrase to be exact. Thanks for the article.

[sai2giri]

on 7/16/2007 sir my name is giri from india.I have one idea that is cheap & best rate i produce good system for blind people.i.e by using voice detector and when we select any one of the icon in system it gives the same name to that person.i wanted the previous model information of the blind person system

[Deannanash]

on 5/30/2007 I thought that a rough draft was exactly that, rough. It was so that you had room to make improvements.Turning one in was just a way to assure instructors that you were actually working on the paper and give them the opportunity to gratique and suggest corrections. My question, should rough drafts be graded like the actual paper?

on 11/22/2005 Gather all the information needed for your report and then outline it. Organize everything in the order you want it to be. I am doing a report on China. I am doing it on culture, so when I outline it, I'll put language first and then education, and so on. Basically, after you organize things, you write them in the order you organized them.