How to write a first draft of an essay - The Five-Paragraph Essay

Here are specific tips to help you create characters that will win over readers. Here are seven excellent pieces of advice for fiction writers from bestselling author Margaret Atwood.

Knowing a few important details about your character can go a long way into giving him or her credibility and life. Recognizing the subtle differences in writing emotion and writing feeling can help render both more powerfully on the page.

Here, Peter James lists his top five Dimensional characters are born from drama—not description. Here are a few things I learned along the way to writing a novel between stints as a copywriter.

How to write the first draft of an essay, report, chapter, or blog post

Outlines based on set pieces and dramatic scenes, for instance, can cause your book to feel like a hopscotch of mandatory moments. But an outline of antagonism could help even pantsers.

For every way our first drafts fail, they get us farther down the road to success. Here's what you can learn from your first draft. A battle scene in a novel can be a very powerful.

Here is some novel writing advice about writing battle scenes. While the list of persuasive elements is long, here analytical essay robinson crusoe three small but crucial moves, things that narrators do when they most successfully convince us.

Every fiction writer has to write across gender lines. Doing so first save you a great deal of time because you will have a "shopping list" to bring to write or to the library that will help how what you need to finish the essay. This will make your further research much easier. But it is equally important that you try to get down on paper what you want the whole essay to say.

This is the only way to test and develop your trial thesis draft. The whole should determine the parts, not the parts the essay.

You may find that your thesis needs major revision and that you really want to take a different approach than you had originally planned. That will help to clarify what details are important enough to pursue and what can be omitted.

Writing a Second Draft

Remember that your trial thesis statement is a guide or a yardstick to help you see where your essay is going. It is a mirror that you can hold up to your essay to show what you are really saying.

It is not an external standard that somebody is imposing on you; it is your decision about what you want to say. But one of the greatest dangers in trying to write an essay is that you change your mind without realizing it, that you lose track of what you started to say and end up saying something else, without being aware of it.

That is why your thesis statement is so important.

But if you don't notice, it almost always leads to problems, as when your essay starts out promising one thing and ends by delivering something else.

So keep comparing your thesis with your essay.

When you have finished your first draft, re-read your thesis statement and ask if that is still what you are saying. If it isn't, revise the thesis. It is not unusual to rewrite your thesis statement a dozen times in the course of revising your essay. If you are an experienced typist, you will probably type your first draft. But if it is easier for you to write in longhand, do that.

So go with whatever comes easiest. You will be revising this work. Many writers find that after writing a draft on longhand the process of entering it into the word processor gives them a chance to easily revise and correct the errors in the original.

Do whatever you're most comfortable with.