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Follow the following seven easy
steps for writing a great first draft in seven days.
I suggest you aim to complete one step every day |
1.
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After you've received the topic
(or after you've received the topic and completed any necessary
reading), freewrite. Write to yourself, "talking"
to yourself on paper. If all the writing you do is for an audience,
a "performance", you'll always feel somewhat scared
("stage fright") or intimidated by writing. Write
"off the top of your head". Don't stop to think,
write while thinking. Don't worry about grammar,
organization, etc. Only you will read this writing. (This
writing should be like the writing we've done in Biggs, except
you get to ask yourself all the questions!) |
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Freewrite for at least 20 minutes at least
twice. |
2. |
After you've generated some raw
ideas and thoughts through your freewrite, spend some time doing
a focused freewrite. At the top of the page or screen,
write a sentence or phrase that, upon re-reading your freewrite,
you find particularly striking or promising. Freewrite
again, but this time on that one line. Now you're trying
to develop your ideas rather than simply generate them, as you
did in the freewrite. |
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Do at least 2 focused free-writes. |
3. |
Begin drafting. But
don't begin at the beginning! How can you set up an
essay before you've written it, if you don't really know what
an essay's going to be like until it's written? Start in
the middle instead. For instance, you might start by summarizing
a few key passages of a reading you'll be discussing in the essay. |
4.
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After on complete draft is done,
start thinking about how it's organized. (I suggest you
do this after rather than before drafting). In the margins
of each paragraph, summarize that paragraph's main idea in 3
- 5 words. If you can't do it, it probably means that your
paragraph doesn't have a main idea, and you'll need to split
it up, reorganize it, or combine it with another paragraph. Then,
write down all the main ideas in "scratch outline"
form on another piece of paper. See what this reveals about
how your essay is structured, and make organizational changes
in pen on hard copy. |
5. |
Enter changes. |
6. |
Go through draft with pen
on hard copy, this time focusing on sentence structure, transition,
grammar, etc. |
7. |
Enter changes. Print out.
Take a deep breath and wait for feedback. |