Have you ever wondered why it is so important to know how to write a good draft for an essay? Spending just five minutes on your draft will save you a lot of writing time.

Thanks to this preliminary step, the ideas and their relationship will be clear: thus, the basis on which you will work will be defined. Otherwise, you will easily lose track of writing and ideas, and the writing will have significant gaps.

Keys to writing a good draft

Depending on the type of writing you need to write, it will be more appropriate to use one type of draft rather than another. In this sense, school writing in general is based on: letters, narrations, summaries, descriptions, translations into our language, excerpts, comments, criticisms and, finally, definitions.

Thereby, we are going to give you some keys to make good use of each draft.

Story

In general, all stories or narratives are divided into three parts: initial situation (introduction), crux and denouement. The more complex you have to make the narrative, the more elaborate the knot will be. In this case, the most appropriate thing would be to make a list of facts and organize them on a timeline.

Pros and cons

Preparing the draft of an argumentative essay is very simple. You just need to make the typical list of pros and cons. Also, if you differentiate the supporting ideas, you can use them to justify the main ideas. In fact, that’s what this type of writing is all about: arguing for and against ideas and coming to a conclusion.

Description

Descriptions can be about a person, thing, place, or time. However, we still find the same problem with these wordings: either you have lots of ideas and information, or you have next to nothing to start with. In the first case, it is necessary to concentrate on the most important ideas; nevertheless, for the second, we are going to give you some leads:

• Description of people. Physical and psychological characteristics, tastes, hobbies or goals.
• Description of things, places or times. Physical characteristics, feelings they convey, conjectures and data about the author, his location or his context.

A useful way to develop your draft would be to choose some of these ideas (or others) and develop them in isolation. This way you would already have the information for each sentence or paragraph separately.

Tips for getting started with a draft

Writing is simple; write well, not so much. Moreover, you can often find yourself stuck in front of a blank page because there is nothing more complicated than to start writing.

Amparo Aurora Ramírez Tamayo, specialist in education and methodology for teaching Spanish and literature, points out that this blockage usually disappears with practice. Therefore, inspiration and creativity also have to work. In fact, the following techniques are very common and useful when you lack inspiration.

Rain of ideas or brainstorming

“ What does the title or topic of the essay suggest to you? » This is the question from which you will start your brainstorming. It’s about writing down all the ideas you can think of that may be related to the topic. You don’t have to order them, and you don’t even have to write sentences: you just have to write concepts.

Once you have finished, discard the ideas that do not convince you and put the rest in order. This process will not take you more than a few minutes.

Think like a journalist to make a good draft for a newsroom

The methods of journalists always start from the answer to questions ” what ? “, ” who ? “, ” How? ‘Or’ What ? “, ” when ? “, ” where ? and ” why? ». Therefore, once you know the subject, you should try to answer these questions. Remember that depending on the topic, you will need to focus more on some questions than others.

The easiest way to deal with this type of draft will be to do it in the form of a diagram. In other words, put your subject in the center, the questions around him and connect each answer to his question.

Choose format and development

The text you produce will depend on its recipient, its purpose or objectives and its possible development. All of these elements constitute the formal instruction and define the style and manner of processing information.

If you know the audience and the platform or medium on which the text will be published, it will be easier for you to design the draft and prepare the writing. Organizing ideas goes hand in hand with space between paragraphs and readability.

A good level of readability, understanding and adaptation to the medium on which the text will be read will:

• Increase the number of readers.
• Be read in less time.
• To be understood and remembered.

Take care of the edition

Since you’ve gone to great lengths to write the draft and you’ll be writing on that basis, take your time to revise and correct it. Read it aloud; it’s even better if you do it after a period of rest, a reasonable period of time that allows you to move away from the text to come back to it with a critical and thoughtful look.

Organization to create a good draft for an essay

Now that you know the guidelines for a good draft, we’ll focus on something that’s repeated throughout the article: organization. If you follow these guidelines and your draft content is organized, you will have everything you need to start writing a good essay.

By the way, let’s not forget these words of Daniel Cassany: ” Drafts show us inside our minds, they show us the paths that our thought follows and explores”. So the end result is important, but so is the path you took to get there:

And you? Do you dare to develop this positive technique in your school life today? Little by little and with perseverance, the difference will undoubtedly be felt. Let’s go !