Writing Your First Draft

Now that you have made an outline or free wrote your ideas you can begin writing your first draft. When beginning your paper do not worry about spelling or even sentence structure. You can deal with the mechanics in other drafts during the revision process. In fact, you do not even have to follow your outline. You can begin with your conclusion or write the body of your paper first if you so desire. The most important thing that you have to do is to get it down on paper.

Here are some hints to make writing your first draft easier:

• If you get stuck on one part of the draft go to another part and continue writing.
• Do not worry about the citations. You can deal with them in a later revision. Just remember to put a symbol of some kind to remind yourself that you are using someone else's quote or idea. A pound sign # or an asterisk * and the last name of the author that you are citing usually work as a fairly efficient way to mark sentences.
• Do not worry about the mechanics. Just get down the basic ideas of the paper.
• Insert notes in bold characters to underscore important ideas.