essay writing prompts

General essay writing rules: creating the first draft.


Every final product has to go through certain processes. Same is the case with writing an essay. The final and refined essay goes through several stages of planning, organizing, rejection, acceptance, and editing. The most crucial step of essay writing however is “drafting”. A draft is the preliminary documentation of your essay ideas and arguments. A draft is generally less organized and connected than a final version of any essay or paper.

Contrary to popular belief, a draft comes much later in the essay writing process when you have already finalized your topic and collected adequate information and data.

5 Easy steps of Drafting


  1. Fight Distractions

    2. Okay, drafting is where you pour in all your knowledge, which exists in the form of brain signals and memories onto a paper so it demands concentration and focus. Get rid of all the distractions and avoid interruptions.

  2. Freedom of pen

    3. Now write down everything you know about your chosen topic. All facts, figures, statistical anomalies, reviews, news clippings, arguments, ideas. Anything you find related (it may be irrelevant, since you will sort out stuff later). It is okay to include anecdotes or bizarre comments as well because a little experimentation and violence of traditional essay writing only brings in creativity, fresh and innovative ideas.

  3. Mapping

    4. Now that you have successfully transferred your oral knowledge into a concrete form, try finding out patterns. Try connecting the dots and start organizing similar ideas together so that you can have a clearer picture as to how your essay might turn out to be.

  4. Connect it with the outline

    5. Remember the outline you made just before your started all the brainstorming well now is the time to cross check if your knowledge fits into each one of the components of your outline. If you are missing something, now is the time to do further research or look for more ideas. You can also add unique items that may or may not be on your outline. However, as a general tradition, it is better to have the following items in your draft: intro, body, analysis, and conclusion.

  5. Sort and Filter

    6. Draft is like any other document comprised of unsorted, random idea, which may or may not be relevant so now you have to sort and filter simultaneously. Keep the things you think you can expand on or the ones your find important. Everything else needs to go.