Develop productive drafting habits - Drafting your paper - Writing your paper

Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

Develop productive drafting habits
Drafting your paper
Writing your paper

Most of us learn to write in the least efficient way—under pressure, rushing to meet a deadline, doing a quick draft the night before, and proofreading maybe a few minutes in the morning. That sometimes works for a short paper. It never works for a long one. You need time and a plan that lets you draft a little at a time, not in marathon sessions that dull your thinking and kill your interest. Give yourself a few days to write, set an achievable page goal for each day, and stick to it.

Always draft in a suitable environment. You may not need a particularly quiet place—in fact, the two of us prefer a little background noise when we write. But you must avoid interruptions. Turn off your cell; take your chat program offline; don't let your friends talk to you while you draft. One of the greatest obstacles to successful drafting is anything that forces you to pay attention to something other than what you are writing.

When you start a drafting session, review your storyboard to decide what you're ready to draft that day. How will it fit into its section and the whole? What reason does this section support? Where does it fit in the overall logic? Which key terms state the concepts that distinguish this section? If you're blocked, skip to another section.

Before you draft, picture your friendly readers and summarize for them (out loud if possible) what has come before the place you plan to start. Then imagine that what you write next simply continues that conversation.

As you draft, keep in front of you a list of the key terms for the concepts that you'll run through your whole report and another list of the key terms for the section you are working on. From time to time, check how often you've used them.

CAUTION

Avoid Procrastinators' Tricks

Don't play procrastinators' tricks on yourself—something everyone is prone to do, including the two of us. (We have missed more than one deadline in preparing this book.) You cannot do your best work if you waste the time you have available. Here are the top four mistakes to avoid:

✵ Don't substitute more reading for writing. Start writing as soon as you have enough evidence to go on. You may have to go back for more, but don't fool yourself that the writing will be easier if only you do more reading.

✵ Don't keep revising the same pages over and over. Focus on getting a complete draft that you can then revise.

✵ Don't focus on how much more you have to do. You will freeze up if you become intimidated by how much you have left. Set small achievable goals for each day and focus on them.

✵ Don't allow yourself to do anything else during your writing time. Never spend a few minutes on texting or chatting, and never, never tell yourself that a quick computer game will refresh your mind so you can get back to work.

Writing is hard. But you won't make it any easier by wasting away the time you set aside to write. Put your head down and tell yourself, Just get it done.