The planning stage can be an invigorating part of the writing process because it is all about possibilities. The drafting stage, on the other hand, feels a lot more like work. At this stage, you have to start writing sentences and paragraphs, whole sections of your essay, and eventually a completed draft. It can be a be a lot to handle, but if you keep the following three principles in mind, drafting can be a manageable and even exciting stage of the writing process.

Principle 1: You don’t have to do everything all at once.

Writing is a complex undertaking. You have to state your ideas clearly, support them convincingly, and organize them effectively. You have to meet your reader’s needs while also fulfilling your own purpose for writing. You have to keep track of formatting, citations, editing, and tone—all of this, even while you yourself continue to develop your ideas as you write about them.

That’s a lot. Luckily, you don’t have to do it all at once. When you write more than one draft, you give yourself the time and opportunity to focus on a few writing tasks at a time before circling back in later drafts to consider others. In your first draft, for example, you may not even think about your readers yet. You may just be writing to yourself, exploring your topic, getting a sense of your position and how you would support it. In your next draft, you can reshape your text to suit your readers’ needs rather than just your own, foregrounding the ideas and evidence that they would find most persuasive.

Likewise, it may not be until a middle or later draft when you figure out the best organization for your essay, or focus on the finer points of incorporating quotations, or format your paper as your instructor has asked. Some writing tasks, such as editing, are even best left for the last draft. What’s the point of proofreading an early draft when you’re still adding or deleting whole paragraphs of content? Save that task for later rather than getting distracted by it early on.

Principle 2: You don’t have to do it all in order.

Similarly, don’t expect yourself to fulfill your writing tasks in a predetermined order. Essays generally begin with an introduction and end with a conclusion, but that doesn’t mean that you have to write your introduction first and your conclusion last. That expectation can set you up for writer’s block if you’re not yet sure how best to begin your essay, and it can prevent you from being flexible about your essay’s organization in later drafts.

Perhaps you’re excited to write about how a particular source or example supports your argument but you don’t yet know where this paragraph should go in your essay. That’s fine. You can still write the paragraph—write it first, if that’s what you’re excited about—and think about where to place it in your essay in a later draft, once you’ve composed some more material. Alternatively, perhaps your instructor wants your essay to first summarize and then critique one of your class readings, in that order, but you’d like to dedicate extra writing time early on to the critique section. That’s fine. Write that section first and circle back to add the summary afterwards. Perhaps writing your critique first will even help you to see what you should emphasize in the summary that will come before it in your paper.

As long as you commit to revising at a later stage, you can begin drafting your essay wherever it makes sense to you to begin. The reverse is also true: you can wait to draft any section that you’re not quite prepared to write. In fact, we often counsel our students to draft the first paragraph of their essay, their introduction, last. Only at that point do some students know their essay well enough to effectively introduce it to their readers.

Principle 3: When you’re drafting, you’re also planning and revising.

The stages of the writing process repeat and overlap, and that’s especially true when you’re drafting. During this stage, you can shift back and forth between composing new material, reviewing it and improving it, and making plans to complete what’s next. In this way, planning propels your draft forward, helping you to prepare for upcoming writing tasks, while revision prompts you to look back, to assess how you’ve done and what you could do differently. For instance, after you’ve written that messy first draft just to get your ideas down on paper, you can do some outlining to figure out how to organize them. Then, once you compose a draft that organizes your main ideas into a logical series of paragraphs, you can revise to improve the topic sentences and transitions that you didn’t have the headspace to perfect in the previous draft.

Once you realize that planning and revising occur in the midst of drafting a piece of writing, you can make them a deliberate part of your process. You can pause between drafts (or paragraphs, or writing sessions) to monitor your progress and to ask yourself questions like these:

• What did I accomplish in the section I just wrote? What did I leave undone?
• What can I do to prepare for the next section that I plan to write? What planning strategies will help me to generate the content I need?
• How will I get feedback on what I have written? Is my own evaluation enough at this point, or do I need input from other readers?
• Now that I have feedback, what revision strategies will help me to make the changes I’d like to make?
• Does what I have written continue to fulfill the requirements of the assignment? The needs of my readers? My own purpose for writing?

When drafting a piece of writing, it’s easy to feel as though your mind is going a mile a minute or is headed in ten different directions at once. The principles above can keep you grounded as you draft. They can help you focus on what you need to accomplish and on how planning and revising can help you to accomplish it.

Continue Reading: 6.4 Revision