#Examples of rough drafts how to

There’s More than One Good Spot for a Thesisĭepending on the goals of the assignment, your thesis may no longer sit at the end of the first paragraph, so let’s discuss a few places it can commonly be found in college writing. Depending on the length of your paper, you may even have more than that. You don’t have to have three! Maybe you have two in great depth, or maybe four that explore that one element from the most salient angles. There is no prescribed number of supporting points. There’s No “Right” Number of Supporting Points This thesis allows you to cover your single, narrow topic in greater depth, so you can examine multiple sides of a single angle of the topic rather than having to quickly and briefly address a broader main idea. “Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of The Hunger Games, creates as much danger for herself as she faces from others over the course of the film.” Take a look at our example from the previous section, “ Finding the Thesis”: Things to Keep in Mind about Structure in College-Level Writing Avoid the Three-Point StructureĪim for a thesis that addresses a single issue rather than the three-point structure.

Instead, this text offers you some guidelines and best practices. That is a trickier question! There isn’t really one prescribed structure that written college-level work adheres to-audience, purpose, length, and other considerations all help dictate what that structure will be for any given piece of writing you are doing. So, if the five-paragraph essay isn’t the golden ticket in college work, what is? Quite often, a paragraph is simply not enough space to have a conversation on paper that is thorough enough to support a stance presented in your thesis. It doesn’t encourage research and discussion at the depth college-level work tends to ask for.It isn’t very flexible-often, topics don’t lend themselves easily to this structure.It can be formulaic-essays structured this way sound a lot alike.It is an effective structure for in-class essays or timed written exams.It familiarizes students with the general shape and components of many essays-a broader introductory conversation giving readers context for this discussion, followed by a more detailed supporting discussion in the body of the essay, and ending with a sense of wrapping up the discussion and refocusing on the main idea.It is a good introduction to a simple way of structuring an essay that lets students focus on content rather than wrestling with a more complex structure.

This structure is commonly taught in high schools, and it has some pros and some cons. Finally, the conclusion paragraph summarizes the main ideas discussed in the essay and states the thesis (or a slightly re-worded version of the thesis) again. That introduction paragraph is followed by three body paragraphs, each one of those going into some detail about one of the parts of the thesis. You might already be familiar with the five-paragraph essay structure, in which you spend the first paragraph introducing your topic, culminating in a thesis that has three distinct parts. Research is also useful because learning what information is available about your topic can help you flesh out what you might want to say about it. Saving the research for a later step in the drafting process can mean making this change after already committing sometimes significant amounts of work to a thesis that existing credible research doesn’t support.

Research is a great early step because learning what information is available from credible sources about your topic can sometimes lead to shifting your thesis. This might include a range of things, such as conducting an interview, creating and administering a survey, or locating articles on the Internet and in library databases. If this is an assignment that asks you to do research to support your points or to learn more about your topic, doing that research is an important early step (see the section on “ Finding Quality Texts” in the “Information Literacy” section). In fact, they don’t even have to be complete sentences (yet)!īegin with research. Write your topic or thesis down and then jot down what points you might make that will flesh out that topic or support that thesis. What do you want to say about it? What connections can you make with it? If you have a working thesis, what points might you make that support that thesis? You already have at least one focusing idea.

#Examples of rough drafts how to

Now that you have a topic and/or a working thesis, you have several options for how to begin writing a more complete draft. Writing a First Draft CC0 Public Domain Image from Max Pixel