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I am an experienced academic passionate about inspiring individuals to aim high. I have assisted multiple students and early career academics to achieve their goals.
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I am an experienced academic passionate about inspiring individuals to aim high. I have assisted multiple students and early career academics to achieve their goals.
The three final stages of the 7-step writing process can be summarized simply as drafting, editing and proofing:
As you can see, these final three stages should make up a massive 40% of the overall time you spend on the assignment, and it is essential that you follow them in the correct order if you want your final submission to be as good as it can be.
If you have followed all the previous four steps in this series on how to write a great assignment, then you will have done all the necessary preparation to enable you to begin creating a solid outline and writing a first full draft of your work. Consider the following points to enable you to complete this drafting stage:
In step 3 you should have already begun to develop an outline plan for your assignment. At this stage you should aim to build on this by ensuring you have included all the key sections and points you want to make. For example:
Consider the paragraphs you will use in each of these sections and remember that it’s usually best to make just one point per paragraph (as per the WEED model). Think of the above sections and paragraph points as buckets you need to fill with sentences.
Although it’s very tempting to begin writing your introduction first, it is not the best place to begin any assignment. Instead, it’s best to start with writing the main body or the largest sections/chapters first as this is where the majority of the marks will be available and because it will be difficult to write an accurate introduction without knowing what’s in the main body first!
I have seen many students either create multiple documents for an assignment as they write more and more drafts, or because they want to separate different sections or chapters of larger assignments (e.g. dissertations). I would advise against this as it can be quite confusing and increases the likelihood of progress being lost. Whilst it is advisable to write more than one draft (see next blog), it’s best to just keep improving one document so that you can see your progress and don’t get confused as to which is the latest or best version.
When you first begin drafting, I would encourage you to have a go at writing a full rough draft of your assignment in one go if possible. This will help you to get going with writing as quickly as possible and overcome any procrastination. This might not be possible for longer assignments but is helpful for smaller ones up to 2000 words. For larger assignments it is still beneficial to write quick initial drafts of sections or chapters, beginning with the middle chapters and ending with the conclusion and introduction.
When you are in the drafting stage of writing it is important to just focus on getting all the content you need into one document initially. Far too many students focus on trying to edit their work in terms of order and style or they worry about the word count too early. In the next blog (6) we will look more at order, style and word count as aspects of editing, but in the drafting phase your main focus should be on getting all the content in.
Finally, when you begin writing remember to avoid what is commonly referred to as ‘waffling’ which means being verbose (using more words than necessary to express something). Aim to create short sentences from your notes collated from your research. Work on how to say things concisely and succinctly rather than in a convoluted way. It’s a good idea to try to copy the writing style of well-published authors in your field as far as possible. The more you read of their work, the more you will find you begin to write sentences like they do.
Once you have completed this 5h step of the 7-step writing process you're ready to move on to the penultimate editing stage. Check out my next blog to see step 6 of how to write a great assignment: review & re-draft until ready.
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