Support your response with examples and at least one quote and one paraphrase (a total of two citations) from the essay you selected. Compose a clear argument in response to the selected essay.Show the steps of the writing process by developing the Week 2 Outline into a workable rough draft.Expand upon your prewriting from the discussion forums (if applicable) by providing specific details about the essay you selected and the topic that it explores.The purpose of a draft is to give your instructor a good sense of your organizational writing skills so he/she can examine your use of the strategies of basic argumentation and critical response and provide you with feedback you can incorporate in your Final Essay. Lastly, visit the following web pages:, andfrom the Ashford Writing Center.įor this assignment, you will be writing a response to the essay you selected for your Week 2 Outline. Review the document as well as your prewriting from the discussion forums the past three weeks. View thevideo for more details on this assignment. You will be using the techniques described in these chapters when writing your draft.

Side Note: In previous articles, I talked about content development, where we find inspiration for articles, types of articles, and our process for editing.Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read Chaptersandof Essentials of College Writing. If you’re starting a blog to support your business and don’t know where to begin, try the process I outlined above and then modify it for your own needs.

“Ugh…help me, Mark.” Mark can you add a wrap up?Įvery writer eventually develops their own process. I really want my conclusions to leave the reader with enough momentum to spark change. I’m sitting here right now thinking, “Crap, Mark (our editor) is going to have to help me finish this article.” I don’t know why I can’t think of conclusion paragraphs. I look for opportunities to add links to other articles we’ve written or link articles that are related.Īlso, I try to remove all uses of “that,” “got,” and “it.” Add a Conclusionįor me the hardest part of writing is wrapping up the idea in a nice little bow. I read the article aloud, again and again. What could give this article a better takeaway?.So am I making this article actionable enough? I want these articles to positively impact the readers’ businesses.Do the paragraphs segue in the correct order?.I start combing back through the content looking for ways to simplify the reading and be less vague. At this point, I start rereading the article. So I’ve made an outline and I’ve broken that outline into paragraphs. I end up creating another Google doc for these tangential ideas. Within this step I’ll start to see ideas for future articles. I like to keep my articles really short, with a reading time of around five minutes maximum. The next step is to complete my thoughts for each header point by writing a paragraph or two tying in the sub-bullets from the list. It also gives you an opportunity to put keywords in the headers and strengthen the SEO prowess of the article. Our mind starts thinking, “Oh just wait, a really good point is coming.” That’s just a theory but I personally like to see sub headers in articles I read. I think subconsciously as readers we see them, even if our eyes aren’t there, yet. I like having sub-headers in my writing for many reasons. Once I have a simple outline in bulleted list form, I move the bullets into headers for the upcoming paragraphs I’m about to write.

Hardest part for me, Mark usually helps.

Cut out everything that isn’t on topic.

Here’s an example of this article’s bulleted list outline. The outline is a game plan for my article. If the bulleted list is boring, then the article will be boring, too. With a bulleted list, I can see the article’s structure and this structure keeps me from going off on a tangent. I create a bulleted list with topical points to be enforced in my article. My Accidental Writing Process Start With an Outline Maybe my writing process is common, but it’s something I realized I was doing by accident a few years ago. I’ve developed a writing process I use to get the content out of my brain and into a rough draft. Surprisingly, writing has become an instrumental part of our “success story,” or rather, “We write stuff and other people read it and share it, and eventually someone buys something from us.” I didn’t grow up with aspirations to teach, share information or write articles like these. Admittedly, I am not a great writer and I never received A’s in English classes. I never thought I’d spend so much time writing as part of my job. Since co-starting LessEverything in 2007, I’ve written over 350 blog articles.

Rough draft writing