STEPS TO DEVELOPING A

WRITTEN COMPOSITION
STEP I: OUTLINE
 Purpose:
 Outlines consist of bullet pointed ideas to
help organize your thoughts
 What they look like:
 There are many ways to create an outline
 Bubble charts
 Plot diagrams/story maps

 Formal outlines
STEP II: ROUGH DRAFT
 Once you have organized your thoughts,
it´s time to write your first draft
 The first draft is never the final

 Word vomit
 Change ideas
 Make corrections
STEP III: FINAL DRAFT
 Always comes after rough draft
 Final is ready to hand in
 Ideas are organized
 No more corrections
 Written/typed neatly
THINGS TO AVOID:
 Run-on sentences
 Comma splices

 Misspellings

 Capitalization and punctuation errors

WHAT IS A RUN-ON SENTENCE?
 When two or more independent
clauses are joined together
 Example:
 I love to write summaries I would write
them all the time if I could.
 Correct:
 I love to write summaries. I would write
them all the time if I could.
WHAT IS A COMMA SPLICE?
 Very similar to run-on sentences
 When two independent clauses are
connected only by a comma
 Example:
 I baked some cookies, I ate them all last night.
 Correct:
 I baked some cookies. I ate them all last night.
 I baked some cookies and I ate them all last

night.
COMMON CAPITALIZATION AND
PUNCTUATION ERRORS

 Make sure to ALWAYS capitalize:

 Names of characters
 Sally, John, Sam, Melissa, George, Tom
 Book titles
 Holes, Of Mice and Men, Willy Wanka and the Chocolate
Factory
 Make sure you use correct punctuation
 Examples:
 Where did he go.
 Wow, what an amazing time we had?

 Yesterday I ate breakfast at 10 o´clock.

 With books, always underline the Title

 When typing, always italisize