Preparing to Write: Drafting Your School Essay
Before building the twelve-story Kwame Nkrumah Conference Center in Accra, the construction crew made a strong foundation. No one sees the foundation, but without one a building may topple. In a similar way, when you prepare to draft your essay, you are constructing a foundation for your paper or essay. There are several ways to go about doing that, and all of them involve thinking about the topic. One reason students can have difficulty getting started on a draft is that they haven’t given the topic enough thought.
Brainstorming
- Jot down lots of disconnected ideas about the topic on pieces of paper.
- Do not limit, edit, or stop your thoughts from flowing.
- From these disconnected thoughts a pattern may arise such as comparisons or a process.
- Put related items together.
- Develop the thoughts into an outline at a later time.
Free Writing
- Set a time limit. During that time write everything that comes to your mind.
- Review what you wrote. Take out everything that is not directly related.
- Put related items together.
- Look for patterns or a way to organize your thoughts into logical sequence for an outline.
Map Your Thoughts
- Draw a circle in the middle of a page.
- Look for related thoughts
- Develop a logical flow, leaving out unrelated items.
- In the map below, the section about negatives was crossed out because it does not fit with the positive aspects of the other items.
After thinking through the points in your essay, you are ready to draft a thesis and some topic sentences for three paragraphs.
Place a Thesis Statement in the First Paragraph
- The best food in the world comes from Italy because it has healthy ingredients, the dishes taste great, and some dishes call up fond memories.
Write a Topic Sentence for Each Paragraph
- Italian dishes taste great whether they are baked, boiled, or fried.
- Most Italian dishes feature similar ingredients. For example, the type of pasta changes the name of the dish in some instances.
- Italian food brings pleasant memories to my mind because my grandmother used to cook Italian food and one summer my family went to Italy.