How to Make a Good Draft for an Essay
Have you ever stopped to think about why it’s so important to know how to make a good draft for an essay? Spending just five minutes on your draft will save you lots of time when writing.
By taking this step prior to writing, both the ideas and their relationship will be clear. Consequently, the basis of our work will be well defined. Otherwise, we would easily lose our flow of ideas and writing, which would result in an essay with critical gaps.
Keys to making a good draft for an essay
The appropriate kind of draft that you’ll need to use will depend on the type of essay you have to write. That’s why we’re going to give you some keys points to ensure you use each draft properly.
Story
In general, all stories or narratives are divided into three parts: set-up (introduction), confrontation, and resolution. The more complex your story is, the more elaborate the confrontation will be. In this case, it would be appropriate to prepare a list of facts and organize them in a timeline.
“For and against” essay
Preparing a draft for an argumentative essay is very simple. You just have to make the typical list of pros and cons. Also, if you differentiate the secondary ones, you can use them to justify the main ideas. In fact, that’s what this type of writing is about, arguing ideas in favor or against and coming to a conclusion.
Description
You can make a descriptive essay of a person, thing, place or moment. However, these essays always present the same problem; you either have many ideas and information or you hardly have anything to start with.
In the first scenario, you have to focus on the most important ideas. Here are a few guidelines to help you with the second scenario:
- Describing people. Physical and psychological characteristics, tastes, hobbies, or goals.
- Description of things, places, or moments. Physical characteristics, feelings being transmitted, conjectures, and data about its author, location, or context.
A useful way to develop the draft would be to choose some of these ideas (or others) and develop them independently. This way, you’ll already have the information for each sentence or paragraph separately.
Tips to start making a draft
Writing is easy, but writing well, not so much. Additionally, you may oftentimes get stuck on a blank sheet of paper because there’s nothing more complex than starting to write.
Amparo Aurora Ramirez Tamayo, a specialist in education and teaching methodology of Spanish and literature, emphasizes that this block usually disappears with practice.
Therefore, inspiration and creativity improve as well. In fact, the following techniques are very common and useful when inspiration fails.
Brainstorming
What does the title or theme of the essay suggest to you? This will be the question from which you’ll begin your brainstorming. It’s about writing all the ideas you can think of that may be related to the topic. It doesn’t have to be in order. You don’t even have to write sentences, just write down concepts.
When you finish, discard the ideas that don’t convince you and order the others. This process won’t take you more than a few minutes.
To make a good draft for an essay, think like a journalist
A journalist’s outlines always start from answering these questions: “What?”, “Who?”, “How?”, “When?”, “Where?”, and “Why?” So, once you know the topic, you’ll have to try to answer those questions. Keep in mind that you should focus more on some questions than others, depending on the topic.
The easiest way to deal with this type of draft will be to distribute it in the form of a diagram. That is, place your topic in the center, the questions around it, and connect each answer to its question.
Organization for a good draft
Now that you know the guidelines for making a good draft, let’s point out something that’s repeated throughout the entire article: organization. If you follow these guidelines and the content of your draft is in order, you’ll have everything you need to start writing a good essay.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
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