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A Step-by-Step Guide to the Draft Writing Process

Writing academic papers in universities or colleges asks for writing a draft to help you meld your thoughts, and expand your ideas further. A rough draft is a preliminary stage you need to undergo in the writing process. Most students, in fact, writers hardly know its importance, and put no effort to write the first draft for their research paper. To help you write well, it is essential to put forth the best effort in the first draft to prepare the final draft, and complete it in a professional manner. With a draft writing guide, you can improve your writing skills to help do the writing assignments well.

Writing is a process and it takes much time as you need to write the first draft, in which the author states the theme of the story.

How to Write a Draft?

Before you start writing your first draft, you should have gone through the brainstorming session to generate ideas, and prewriting and outlining. There are 6 steps to write the first draft, and they are:

  • Just Start Writing

The writing process asks for being disciplined to develop good writing habits. You need to have a calm and peaceful writing space at home or office to help with your writing sessions. All you have to do is to just start and keep writing in case you experience writer’s block. Most successful authors figure out what they want to write first. For instance, Matthew Quirk, who is one of the “New York Times Bestselling Authors”, figures out a story and includes all conventions of the thriller in it to make it compelling.  You have an idea and a blank page, you have to just sit down to write what you think about it and how will you connect it with supporting points.

  • Do Research

Academic writing requires you to do research to know more about the subject. This may include searching the Internet for relevant websites, which provide details of the studies conducted in the field and their outcome. There are innumerable sources such as academic papers, historical records, journal articles and newspaper articles. Research also includes conducting a survey or an interview and finding related articles in the library databases. 

  • Write a Thesis Statement

When it comes to writing academic papers, you have to write a thesis statement, which consists of one or two sentences. A thesis statement clearly summarizes the central idea or arguments or main points of a piece of writing. By writing it, you state the purpose of your paper, as well as communicate to the readers your position on the subject. You have to write it in the opening paragraph.

A thesis statement may be of various types such as analytical, expository and argumentative. When the analytical type interprets or analyses a topic’s different aspects, the expository type explains a topic. The argumentative type of statement states the author’s stand on the topic, and why he or she has taken that particular position. You have to ensure that you write a strong thesis statement, which represents your original ideas. If you take someone’s ideas, paraphrase them appropriately by changing both the words and sentence structure. Otherwise, it may result in plagiarized content.   

  • Organize Your Ideas

The next step is to organize your thoughts or ideas, which should be focused on the thesis statement. This requires you to follow a few steps:

  1. Selecting and grouping related ideas: Here you need to go through the ideas that you have generated during the prewriting stage, and select the ones that are relevant to your thesis statement and group them. Remove those ideas that are not related and required.
  2.  Expanding your ideas: This step helps you to critically study the grouped ideas, and find those not having enough support points. In case you need to expand your ideas, you can by doing some research. In this stage, try writing unique content, where you can use a plagiarism detector to avoid duplicate content
  3. Putting your ideas in order: With this step, you can have your ideas grouped in paragraphs, which will have a topic sentences and supporting points like reasons and examples.
  4. Writing conclusion: You have to restate your thesis statement to conclude your argument or analysis. It is essential to write the conclusion in a concise form.
  • Avoiding Perfectionism

You need not try to make your writing perfect for it will lead to incompletion of writing. When you read it again and again while writing, you will have a tendency to rewrite the paragraphs. At this stage, you have to focus on just refining your writing to make your views or arguments strong.

  • Checking for Plagiarism

Before you finish writing your first draft, it is essential to check your content for plagiarism. Taking this step to the later stage after writing the final draft may sometimes result in reworking the paragraphs if the online plagiarism checker finds any copied content. When plagiarism has become a serious issue, detecting and controlling it is important.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in plagiarism checking has helped plagiarism scanners to dig deep, and find any matching content from billions of websites across the Internet. Deploying advanced algorithms helps find not only the paraphrased text but also the special or hidden characters used to manipulate the content.     

Instances of plagiarism are increasing at an exponential rate in the academic field. Educational institutions are using advanced anti-plagiarism tools, which provide multi-layered, as well as extensive searches across the Internet for any similarities or paraphrased text. After the plagiarism test, they receive a comprehensive report of the matched text with a percentage. The teacher can study the report and add feedback at places where the student needs to revise the text. The student can also be taught to use quotation marks and citations appropriately to pass the duplicate content test by a trail version of plagiarism checker.

Having explained all the steps, you can now work on your writing assignments easily following the draft writing guide.

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