Once you’ve gotten familiar with your assignment, considered your audience, and
Once you’ve gotten familiar with your assignment, considered your audience, and completed some pre-writing work, it’s probably a good time to start creating a draft. There is a lot of pre-drafting work that can be useful for building and connecting ideas, but eventually it becomes important to flesh those ideas out into paragraphs and see how they work together as a more complete piece of writing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Once you have generated a good range of ideas, your next step will be to look through the ideas you’ve come up with. Which ones are most interesting to you to research and write about? You will, ideally, find several topics in your idea generation process that are interesting to you and robust enough that you will be able to clearly support them (and potentially also locate strong sources to help you do that).
So, how do you figure out which, out of all these good ideas you’ve come up with, is THE idea you want to work with?
What kind of writing is the assignment asking you to do? Is this a review? A summary? An argumentative piece?
Will you need to do research and cite sources? If this is the case, you can probably set aside ideas that will be difficult to do research for, such as a story about a personal experience. These might be better suited to a different assignment.
Once you have narrowed your ideas to ones that fit the assignment parameters, look for connections between the remaining ideas. Does one support another? Are a few of them different ways of looking at the same thing? Can two combine to make a stronger, more complete topic? Does one spark your interest in a way the others don’t?
If you complete these steps and find you have no topics left that have passed these tests, you will want to generate new ideas, maybe with a different generation method. If you want to look at or review some ways to do this, revisit from the “Strategies for Getting Started ” section (in the “Prewriting” portion of this text). Now that you know what kinds of tests those ideas will be put to, it will likely be easier to generate ideas that will make it all the way through this process!
If you are still looking at several potential topics after this process, pick just one of them, or one tightly-connected group of them, to work with for this project.
CC0 Public Domain Image from Max Pixel
Now that you have a topic and/or a working thesis, you have several options for how to begin writing a more complete draft.
Just write. You already have at least one focusing idea. Start there. What do you want to say about it? What connections can you make with it? If you have a working thesis, what points might you make that support that thesis?
Make an outline. Write your topic or thesis down and then jot down what points you might make that will flesh out that topic or support that thesis. These don’t have to be detailed.
Begin with research. If this is an assignment that asks you to do research to support your points or to learn more about your