2aQuick Reference: Drafting

Writing a rough draft is an opportunity to explore possibilities for the

arrangement and expression of ideas. In the drafting stage, you can
organize ideas from your planning materials and experiment with ways
to express them in sentences, paragraphs, and paper drafts, knowing
that you can revise the work later.

2bOrganization
Review your planning materials, looking for useful information and
patterns among ideas. Planning materials often suggest a natural
pattern for organizing the paper, probably following the common
patterns of chronological, spatial, or topical arrangement.

2b-1 Chronological Arrangement

A chronological arrangement presents information in sequence,
explaining what happened first, second, third, and so on. Narratives
telling the story of your first day at a job or describing a political debate
are good examples.

2b-2 Spatial Arrangement

A spatial arrangement recreates the physical features of a subject. For
instance, a writer might describe a town by “leading” readers from a
residential area in the north to a commercial area in the south. When
physical features are important, spatial arrangement can convey
insights effectively.

2b-3 Topical Arrangement

A topical arrangement organizes supporting ideas to present the thesis
with the greatest possible emphasis. This approach can follow a number
of patterns according to your purpose—from most important point to
least important, for instance, or from simplest to most complex.
Persuasive and argumentative papers often use a mixed approach: they
present the second-most important point first, drawing readers in with
strong material, then sandwich in lesser points to fill out the discussion,
saving the most important point for last in order to close with especially
convincing evidence.

2b-4 Other Organizations

Other organizational patterns can also be used to arrange ideas within
paragraphs and to organize full-length papers. Your planning materials,
 for example, may suggest one of these common patterns: analogy, cause
and effect, process, classification, or definition. Learn more about these
patterns in 4e.

Organizing Your Materials

Before beginning a first draft, review your thesis and planning materials
and experiment with each of the organizational patterns just described.
Choose one pattern and then organize your planning materials
accordingly.

2cAn Outline
An outline is a structural plan using headings and subdivisions to
clarify the main features of the paper and the interrelationships among
them. Loosely structured informal outlines provide simplicity and
freedom, while highly systematic formal outlines emphasize clarity
and completeness.

In the earliest stages of drafting, an informal outline works well. At later

stages of writing, a formal outline is helpful. Importantly, informal and
formal outlines are just plans. If your plan does not work, decide why
and make the necessary changes.

2c-1 An Informal Outline

An informal outline is intended for your use only. Consequently, it may
follow any consistent pattern that makes sense to you. Consider creating
lists marked with numbers, arrows, dots, or dashes to indicate the
relative importance among ideas.

Sample Informal Outline

Adam’s Brief, Informal Outline

 Viewing Equipment
 → Home: screen and sound
 → Theater: screen and sound
 Food
 → Home: anything available
 → Theater: food for purchase (snacks or meals, depending on location)
 Viewing Process
 → Home: interrupted and nonlinear
 → Theater: uninterrupted and linear
 Your Informal Outline
Compose an informal outline that arranges the large elements from your
planning materials. You can add missing details and examples as you
draft your paper.

A Formal Outline
A formal outline is intended for readers, so it must adhere to the
following conventions.

 Indicate major topics with uppercase roman numerals (I, II, III).
 Indicate subdivisions of topics with uppercase letters (A, B, C).
 Indicate main points under subdivisions (examples, supporting facts, and
so on) with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3).
 Indicate details under subdivision main points with lowercase letters (a, b,
c).
 Use parallel forms. Use either phrases and words or full sentences
consistently for each item on the same level. An outline may use topic
sentences for major topics and then use phrases in subdivisions of
topics, but if so, it must follow this form consistently throughout the
outline.
 Include only one idea in each entry. Further divide entries that contain
more than one idea.
 Include at least two entries at each level. For instance, there should never
be an A item without a B.
 Indicate the inclusion of introductions and conclusions, but do not outline
their content.
 Align headings of the same level at the same margin indent.
Sample

Adam’s Formal Outline

In his outline, Adam uses sentences at the roman numeral (paragraph) level and phrases
for the topics within paragraphs.

 INTRODUCTION
 Thesis Statement: Although seeing a film at home has its appeal, nothing can match the
experience of seeing a film at the theater.

I. The projection equipment at home simply cannot compare to that at a theater.

1. Home

1. Screen size
2. Sound quality
2. Theater
 1. Screen size
2. Sound quality
II. The food available at home simply doesn’t have the weird appeal of theater snacks.

1. Home

1. Everyday food and drink

2. Reasonably priced
2. Theater

1. Fun snack foods like buttered popcorn, oversized sodas, and giant boxes of candy
2. Outrageously priced
III. The process of viewing a film at home cannot recreate the theater experience.

1. Home

1. Frequent interruptions
2. Nonlinear pacing
2. Theater

1. Few interruptions
2. Linear pacing
 CONCLUSION
Your Formal Outline
Using your informal outline as a starting point, complete a formal
outline, providing necessary elaboration.

2dA Rough Draft

A rough draft is the first full-length written form of a paper. Uneven
development, messiness, and difficulties with expression are typical in
rough drafts because drafting is a shifting process that requires
thinking, planning, writing, rethinking, replanning, and writing again.

Strategies: Composing a Rough Draft

 Gather all your materials together. Make sure that your planning materials
and writing supplies (computer, tablet, or pen and paper) are nearby.
Try to avoid drafting on your phone so you can see a larger portion of
your paper as you write it.
 Cut down on distractions. Consider turning off notifications and putting
your phone on silent, as well as disabling your wireless connection for a
few hours. This will help you focus fully on your draft.
 Have your working thesis statement in mind. The topic and opinion
presented in your working thesis statement should guide your work.
  Work from your outline. Write one paragraph at a time, in any order,
postponing work on troublesome sections until you have gained
momentum.
 Remember the purpose of your paper. Arrange and develop only the ideas
presented in your outline—or closely related ideas that occur to you.
 Use only ideas and details that support your working thesis statement. Resist
any tendency to drift from your point.
 Remember your readers’ needs. Include any information and explanations
readers will need to understand the discussion.
 Do not worry about technical matters at this time. Concentrate on getting
your ideas down in words. You can attend to punctuation, mechanics,
and spelling later.
 Rethink and modify troublesome sections. If the organization of the paper is
not working, if an example seems weak, or if the order of the paragraphs
no longer seems logical, change it.
 Give yourself a periodic break from writing. Time away from writing helps
you to maintain a fresh perspective and attain objectivity.
Your Rough Draft
Write a rough draft of your paper, using the guidelines above. Work
from your outline to ensure that each idea is supported by adequate
details.

2eTitle, Introduction, and Conclusion

Titles, introductions, and conclusions deserve special attention because
they create the first and final impressions of your paper.

2e-1 Title
A good title should be descriptive, letting readers know what the paper
is about. It should also be imaginative, sparking readers’ interest.

Strategies: Developing a Good Title

 Use words or phrases that explicitly identify the topic. Search your draft for
expressions that are clear and brief.

 Advertising in the Age of Snapchat

 Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The Myth of the Latin Woman”
 Play with language. Consider variations of well-known expressions.
Use alliteration (repetition of initial sounds) or assonance (repetition
of vowel sounds).

 A Nation Blinded by Seeing No Color

 The Price of Popularity
  Consider two-part titles. The first part is often inventive, the second
descriptive. Separate the two parts with a colon.

 Conversations with Death: Surviving Leukemia

 “Cat Person”: The Complexities of Consent
 Match the tone of the title to the tone of the paper. Use serious titles for
serious papers, ironic titles for ironic papers, and so on.

 Philip Wheelwright’s “The Meaning of Ethics”

 A Modest Proposal: Go Ahead, Arm the First Graders
Write several alternative titles and select the one that best clarifies the
topic for readers and piques their interest.

2e-2 Introduction
The introduction to a paper creates interest and clarifies the subject
and opinion for readers. Depending on the length of the paper, an
introduction may be one or several paragraphs long.

Developing a Strong Introduction

 Adjust the length of the introduction to the length of the writing.
 Match the tone of the introduction to the tone of the paper. A casual,
personal paper needs an informal introduction, whereas a serious,
academic paper requires a formal introduction.
 Use the introduction to draw readers into the discussion. The introduction
should create interest, suggest the focus of the paper, and indicate the
paper’s development.
Most introductions use one or more of the following strategies to create
interest and, at the end, present a specific thesis statement.

Ten Introductory Strategies

Allusion
Refer to a work of art, music, literature, film, and so on, or to a mythical,
religious, or historical person or event.

In the blockbuster Disney film The Lion King, nature is presented as a “circle of life” in
which animals coexist blissfully. Everybody gets along. Hakuna matata.
In the real world of America’s national parks, however, cohabitation is proving to be far
more harrowing. At California’s Channel Islands National Park, federally protected golden
eagles have driven endemic island foxes down to dangerously low numbers, prompting
managers to capture eagles and ship them elsewhere. And just off the shore of Alaska’s
Kenai Fjords, orcas (killer whales) are feasting on thousands of endangered sea otters after
switching over from Stellar sea lions, which have been in a downward spiral. Across the
National Park System, resource managers are confronting epic challenges that reinforce the
role of parks as refuges but highlight their limitations, thus posing the question: what
should parks do, if anything, to manage the clash between species?
—Todd Wilkinson, “Balancing Act”

Analogy
Make a comparison that is interesting, helpful, and relevant to the topic.

Visiting Catalina Island is like stepping into a postcard of southern California in the 1930s:
there are palm trees, sparkling seas, and Spanish-style buildings that gleam as white as a
movie idol’s smile.

Couples once sailed here on white steamships to dance in a vast ballroom overlooking the
harbor lights of Avalon, the island’s only town. Yachtsmen, families, beach buffs, and sports
fishermen still flock to Avalon, which parties all summer but is pleasantly sleepy in the off-
season. Many of Catalina’s 2,900 residents came for the weekend—and simply never left.
—Merry Vaughn Dunn, “The Island of Romance”

Anecdote
Begin with a short description of a relevant incident.

“In our village there was a man who had a daughter, and a guy wanted to marry her,”
reminisces Dadie Aime Loh, from the southwestern Ivory Coast. The suitor was of another
religion, however. “The father said the guy must change his religion. He did. They made a
song about it in the village, and everybody was singing it. They were making fun of him:
‘Just to have a wife, you gave up your religion.’ People back home make songs about
everything.”

For the Dida people, Loh asserts, music is not the same thing as it is for most contemporary
Westerners, and not just because the drums and bells, calls and responses, sound a
different beat. Loh, who demonstrates and teaches Dida music at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, conjures up a world in which gifted singers may be celebrated
but the talents of a few don’t silence the voices of everyone else. “If you can speak, if you
can think, you can make a song,” he says.
—Susan Milius, “Face the Music”

Definition
Define a term that is central to your topic. Avoid defining terms already
understood unless such a definition serves a special purpose.
The problem with the word “privacy” is that it falls short of conveying the big picture.
Privacy isn’t just about hiding things. It’s about self-possession, autonomy, and integrity. As
we move into the computerized world of the twenty-first century, privacy will be one of the
most important civil rights. But this right of privacy isn’t the right of people to close their
doors and pull down their window shades—perhaps because they want to engage in some
sort of illicit or illegal activity. It’s the right of people to control what details about their
lives stay inside their own houses and what leaks to the outside.
—Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century

Description
Use a description of a scene, person, or event to establish context or
mood for your topic.

I’m in my kitchen, browsing through Puerto Rican cookbooks, when it hits me. These books
are in English, written for people who don’t know a sofrito from a sombrero. Then I
remember the afternoon I returned to Puerto Rico for the summer after 15 years of living
in the United States. The family gathered for dinner in my mother’s house. The men settled
in a corner of the living room, while Mami and my sisters chopped, washed, seasoned. I
stood on the other side of the kitchen island, enjoying their Dance of the Stove with Pots
and Pans—the flat metal sounds, the thud of the refrigerator door opening and closing, the
swish of running water—a percussive accompaniment enhancing the fragrant sizzle of
garlic and onions in hot oil.

“Do you cook Puerto Rican?” Norma asked as she cored a red pepper.

“No,” I answered, “I never got the hang of it.”

“How can you be Puerto Rican without your rice and beans?” joked Alicia.

“Easy,” said Mami, “She’s no longer Puerto Rican.”

If she had stabbed me with the chicken-gutting knife in her hand it would have hurt less. I
swallowed the pain. “Si, Mami,” I said, “I have become Americana.”
—Esmeralda Santiago, “A Puerto Rican Stew”

Facts and Figures

Begin with specific, interesting, useful information or statistics.

The Crystal Palace, designed in 1850 by the English architect Joseph Paxton to house
showpieces of Victorian technology, was 1,848 feet long and 408 feet wide. It supported
293,655 panes of glass, and over the 140 days of its original use, it sheltered 6,063,986
people, or roughly one-third the total population of the United Kingdom at the time. In his
diary, the historian and statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay called the Crystal Palace “a
most gorgeous site; vast; graceful; beyond the dreams of the Arabian romances.” A detail
that Macaulay failed to remark upon was that the great dome, or transept, of the Crystal
Palace was framed in wood painted to look like steel merely to allay public fear that so vast
and important an edifice could be held aloft by so “flimsy” a material as wood. Yet in
relation to its density, wood is stiffer and stronger, both in bending and twisting, than
concrete, cast iron, aluminum alloy, or steel.
—Karl J. Niklas, “How to Build a Tree”

New Discussion of an Old Subject

Explain why a topic that may be familiar is worth examining from a new
perspective.

As recently as 1960, infertility in couples was, to put the matter delicately, not a top
priority for the medical establishment: it was a women’s problem. Demographers routinely
attributed the reproductive success of a couple to the woman if the fertility of the
individuals was unknown. In other words, if a couple tried and failed to have children, the
presumption was that the woman was barren, not that the man was sterile. In general, an
infertile couple was regarded as exceptional.

These days infertility is not so casually dismissed. For one thing, the man falls under
suspicion as well. The evidence of the past twenty years shows what, with hindsight, may
always have been the case: that the male is a contributing factor in a couple’s infertility 50
percent of the time—sexual equality with a vengeance.
—Diana Lutz, “No Conception”

Question
Use a question or a series of questions to prompt readers to think about
your subject.

“What is the charm of necklaces? Why would anyone put something extra around their
neck and then invest it with special significance? A necklace doesn’t afford warmth in cold
weather, like a scarf, or protection in combat, like chain mail; it only decorates. We might
say, it borrows meaning from what it surrounds and sets off, the head with its supremely
important material contents, and the face, that register of the soul.”
—Emily R. Grosholz, “On Necklaces”

Quotation
Quote what someone has said in a conversation, interview, or speech or
quote a portion of a poem, short story, article, or book.

Thoreau once wrote, “For my part, I could easily do without the post office. I never received
more than one or two letters in my life . . . that were worth the postage.”

Well, that was long before the mail became electronic and postage became almost obsolete,
but once again, the cabin-dwelling ascetic raises an interesting question. With all of these
words rushing up and down, to and fro, back and forth, with thousands of messages
crossing the Internet on a daily basis, is any of it worth reading?
—Dinty W. Moore, The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth about the Internet

Startling Statement
Use an arresting statement to get readers’ attention and arouse their
interest.

The prevalence of malnutrition in children is staggering. Globally, nearly 195 million

children younger than five years are undernourished. Malnutrition is most obvious in the
developing countries, where the condition often takes severe forms; images of emaciated
bodies in famine-struck or war-torn regions are tragically familiar. Yet milder forms are
more common, especially in developed nations. […]

Undernutrition triggers an array of health problems in children, many of which can become
chronic. It can lead to extreme weight loss, stunted growth, weakened resistance to
infection and, in the worst cases, early death. The effects can be particularly devastating in
the first few years of life, when the body is growing rapidly and the need for calories and
nutrients is greatest.
—Larry J. Brown and Ernesto Pollitt, “Malnutrition, Poverty and Intellectual Development”

Your Title and Introduction

Write several titles for your paper and select the most effective one.
Then write two draft versions of the introduction, using the previous
guidelines. Make sure that the strategies both create interest and clearly
and appropriately introduce your topic.

2e-3 Conclusion
A conclusion reemphasizes the point of the paper and allows you to
create a final impression. Most conclusions incorporate a brief but
specific summary and then use a concluding strategy to present a
general observation. Conclusions are usually condensed to a single
paragraph, but they can certainly be longer, especially in longer papers.

Some introductory strategies—such as allusion, analogy, anecdote,

description, and quotation—can also be useful concluding strategies.

Four Concluding Strategies

Challenge
Ask readers to reconsider and change their behavior or ideas.
I wouldn’t dream of arguing that we Americans have found the Holy Grail of cultural
diversity when in fact we’re still searching for it. We have to think hard about our growing
pluralism. It’s useful, I believe, to dissect in the open our thinking about it, to see whether
the lessons we are trying to learn might stimulate some useful thinking elsewhere. We do
not yet quite know how to create “wholeness incorporating diversity,” but we owe it to the
world, as well as to ourselves, to keep trying.
—Harlan Cleveland, “The Limits of Cultural Diversity”

Framing Pattern
When appropriate, repeat the introductory strategy as the concluding
strategy, but be sure that it reflects the progress of thought in the paper.
(Read the introduction that corresponds to the following
conclusion here.)

I’ve learned to insist on my peculiar brand of Puerto Rican identity. One not bound by
geographical, linguistic or behavioral boundaries, but rather, by a deep identification with a
place, a people and a culture which, in spite of appearances, define my behavior and
determine the rhythms of my days. An identity in which I’ve forgiven myself for having to
look up a recipe for arroz con pollo in a Puerto Rican cookbook meant for people who don’t
know a sombrero from a sofrito.
—Esmeralda Santiago, “A Puerto Rican Stew”

Summary
Summarize, restate, or evaluate the major points in your paper.

The mysterious nature and economic cost of back pain are driving a growing interest in
research, and the coming years may reveal the fundamental aspects of this problem in
more detail. In the meantime, for most, back-pain patients the stereotypical physician
advisory to “take two aspirin and call me in the morning” comes to mind. A richer and
better course of action might be to take pain relievers as needed, stay in good overall
physical condition, keep active through an acute attack if at all possible, and monitor the
condition for changes over a few days or a week. Back pain’s power to inflict misery is
great, but that power is usually transient. In most cases, time and perseverance will carry a
patient through to recovery.
—Richard A. Deyo, “Low-Back Pain”

Visualization of the Future

Predict what the nature or condition of your topic will be like in the
near or distant future.

Will politicians respond? The science is solid but not 100 percent certain, and it will be a lot
more expensive to contain carbon dioxide than it has been to limit CFCs. So the politicians
probably won’t respond, at least for now. Maybe the Nobel committee will someday give a
prize to the scientists who conducted pioneering studies of global warming. Maybe the
Republicans, if they’re still in power, will take action. Or maybe it will be too late.
—Michael D. Lemonick, “When Politics Twists Science”

Your Concluding Paragraphs

Write two draft versions of your conclusion. Make sure that the
strategies are closely connected to the tone and topic of your paper.