Stages of Creating an Essay

As you must already be aware of the structure of a conventional essay (introduction, main body, conclusion), there are also a few stages of the writing process that you should consider. No essay should be composed without pre-writing, drafting, and editing. These three steps will make your paper immaculate and eradicate all the possible mistakes or miswriting.

Learn to Write a College Essay

Pre-Writing

Before even touching your pen (or a computer keyboard), you should already be ready with the ideas that will be presented in the essay. One of the most helpful means of gathering ideas is brainstorming. Choose a preferable object or a phenomenon of your writing and simply write down the things you can associate it with. A few hours of hard thinking will fill you with numerous ideas to discuss in your essay. Then, sort out them according to the appropriate classification; get rid of unnecessary points to choose only the most relevant ones. After that, you are recommended to create an outline for your essay. This is a brief plan of what you are going to talk about in your paper. Make sure that you will open the subject completely and will not miss any significant facts.

Drafting

Here, it is high time to extend your outline into the first version of full work. Consider the ideas that you have come up with during the brainstorming part – they will surely be useful here as the points of the outline are just ordinary phrases that should be transformed into full paragraphs. Remember to work according to the structure. Include brief information about the topic in the introduction and finish in with the thesis statement. Divide the main body into paragraphs and provide solid arguments and reliable supportive statements to them. Make sure you do have enough examples to illustrate your theoretical material. Finally, make the conclusion that will sum up all the information that has been mentioned above. In addition, you should remember that this is your first draft, so there is no need to worry about most of the mistakes. Of course, you should write as correctly as possible, however, your main goal at this stage is to extend your ideas into the complete text.

Editing

As soon as you have your draft ready, you should put the paper aside. Your head has to chill out after such a hard work. Later, with a fresh mind, you can finally start proofreading. Here, you make the essay look readable and neat. Eradicate mistakes that might have appeared as you were preparing the draft. The perfect essay must be perfect in everything – apart from the solid ideas you must make your paper completely free of any grammatical, punctuation and stylistic errors. As soon as you have finished editing, you may ask a close person to polish the essay by rereading it one more time – there is never enough proofreading.

Your style is unique – there are two similar ways of writing. Remember, there is no difference in what you are writing about, it only matters how you create your essay.