does an essay draft have to be complete

Critique partners and beta readers

Once your first self-edit is complete, you’ll need a fresh set of eyes to help direct your efforts. Enter critique partners and beta readers.

On the surface, it may sound like critique partners and beta readers do the same thing: they both read through your work and provide feedback.

However, there’s some nuance that separates the two:

Critique partners are writers who read like writers. But beta readers are writers or readers who read like readers.

Because your critique partners are fellow writers, they’re great at spotting technical issues, like:

• Weak character motivations
• Stilted dialogue
• Clichéd descriptions
• Continuity errors

Getting this technical feedback is especially helpful before handing your story off to readers, so it’s best to let your critique partners read a story before jumping into a beta reading round.

As a bonus, your critique partners can spot these issues and help you figure out ways to fix them while you’re both “talking shop.”

Beta readers, on the other hand, are fantastic for getting feedback on emotional reactions to your story, like:

• Whether a certain character was likable or not
• If certain chapters felt too fast or too slow
• Whether the conflict kept them engaged
• If they found themselves wanting to read more

Here, you’re getting close to how a reader would react to your story once it’s published. Use their feedback to determine if the story prompts the response you intended it to and edit accordingly.

Now, a quick note on the biggest difference between beta readers and critique partners: the detail level of their suggestions. If beta readers aren’t writers themselves, they may not be able to articulate the specifics of what they dislike in the story. Their feedback can be vague, amounting to: “I don’t like this scene, but I’m not sure why.” The best way to identify problem spots is to look at the feedback of all of your beta readers. If multiple readers have an issue with a scene or section, it’s a good indicator to pay close attention on editing.

Critique partners, however, can usually pin-point issues with laser precision, but may go overboard with their suggestions. Feedback may seem harsh and critique partners with a domineering streak may make “my way or the highway” style fix suggestions.

So it’s ultimately a fine balance. Note where you can improve and keep that in mind during your content edits, but also trust your gut instinct. In the end, it’s your story.

Once you’ve gone through a round or two (or more) of content edits, it’s time to move to line edits. These edits ensure your story is as strong as possible when it’s published. You’re examining your story, sentence by sentence, to catch dialogue issues, problems with the flow of a paragraph, and weak sentences that need rewriting.

If you’d like to hire a professional editor, this is a great stage to do it. But, if you’d prefer to tackle this edit yourself, ProWritingAid can make your process run much more smoothly. Check out our guide to six of the key reports that can make your line edits easy.

The proofreading stage is what most writers think of when they think of “editing.” Here, you’re checking for spelling and grammatical errors and ensuring consistency. Think of it as a final polish.

While some writers may hire a professional editor to proofread, it’s not a necessity, especially if you’re looking to publish traditionally. Often, a friend with a good eye for grammar can catch trouble spots on their read through. And ProWritingAid’s spelling and grammar reports can point out any little details they may have missed.

With your proofreading sweep complete, congratulations! Your story is ready to share with the wider reading world. Now, it’s time to move on to publishing or querying process.

If you’re looking to self publish your story, check out our webinar on the 7 Processes of Publishing . And for those who want to query, Jennifer Xue’s guide covers the process in depth .

Are you prepared to write your novel? Download this free book now:

The Novel-Writing Training Plan

So you are ready to write your novel. excellent. but are you prepared the last thing you want when you sit down to write your first draft is to lose momentum., this guide helps you work out your narrative arc, plan out your key plot points, flesh out your characters, and begin to build your world..

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As ProWritingAid’s Growth Marketing Manager, Micah’s approach to marketing combines her three favorite things: writing, user research, and data analysis. Previously, she managed PR and partnerships for startup GrowthMentor. A geek about all things science, but especially her former field of study, microbiology, and neuroscience, she’s always on the lookout for ways to incorporate fascinating new research into writing. Much of her previous freelance work analyzes the science of productivity, creativity, and how we can better understand the intersection of the two to lead richer lives. Outside of work, you can usually find her baking or typing away at her latest science fiction or fantasy project.

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8.3 Drafting

Learning objectives.

• Identify drafting strategies that improve writing.
• Use drafting strategies to prepare the first draft of an essay.

Drafting is the stage of the writing process in which you develop a complete first version of a piece of writing.

Even professional writers admit that an empty page scares them because they feel they need to come up with something fresh and original every time they open a blank document on their computers. Because you have completed the first two steps in the writing process, you have already recovered from empty page syndrome. You have hours of prewriting and planning already done. You know what will go on that blank page: what you wrote in your outline.

Getting Started: Strategies For Drafting

Your objective for this portion of Chapter 8 “The Writing Process: How Do I Begin?” is to draft the body paragraphs of a standard five-paragraph essay. A five-paragraph essay contains an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. If you are more comfortable starting on paper than on the computer, you can start on paper and then type it before you revise. You can also use a voice recorder to get yourself started, dictating a paragraph or two to get you thinking. In this lesson, Mariah does all her work on the computer, but you may use pen and paper or the computer to write a rough draft.

Making the Writing Process Work for You

What makes the writing process so beneficial to writers is that it encourages alternatives to standard practices while motivating you to develop your best ideas. For instance, the following approaches, done alone or in combination with others, may improve your writing and help you move forward in the writing process:

• Begin writing with the part you know the most about. You can start with the third paragraph in your outline if ideas come easily to mind. You can start with the second paragraph or the first paragraph, too. Although paragraphs may vary in length, keep in mind that short paragraphs may contain insufficient support. Readers may also think the writing is abrupt. Long paragraphs may be wordy and may lose your reader’s interest. As a guideline, try to write paragraphs longer than one sentence but shorter than the length of an entire double-spaced page.
• Write one paragraph at a time and then stop. As long as you complete the assignment on time, you may choose how many paragraphs you complete in one sitting. Pace yourself. On the other hand, try not to procrastinate. Writers should always meet their deadlines.
• Take short breaks to refresh your mind. This tip might be most useful if you are writing a multipage report or essay. Still, if you are antsy or cannot concentrate, take a break to let your mind rest. But do not let breaks extend too long. If you spend too much time away from your essay, you may have trouble starting again. You may forget key points or lose momentum. Try setting an alarm to limit your break, and when the time is up, return to your desk to write.
• Be reasonable with your goals. If you decide to take ten-minute breaks, try to stick to that goal. If you told yourself that you need more facts, then commit to finding them. Holding yourself to your own goals will create successful writing assignments.
• Keep your audience and purpose in mind as you write. These aspects of writing are just as important when you are writing a single paragraph for your essay as when you are considering the direction of the entire essay.

Of all of these considerations, keeping your purpose and your audience at the front of your mind is the most important key to writing success. If your purpose is to persuade, for example, you will present your facts and details in the most logical and convincing way you can.

Your purpose will guide your mind as you compose your sentences. Your audience will guide word choice. Are you writing for experts, for a general audience, for other college students, or for people who know very little about your topic? Keep asking yourself what your readers, with their background and experience, need to be told in order to understand your ideas. How can you best express your ideas so they are totally clear and your communication is effective?

You may want to identify your purpose and audience on an index card that you clip to your paper (or keep next to your computer). On that card, you may want to write notes to yourself—perhaps about what that audience might not know or what it needs to know—so that you will be sure to address those issues when you write. It may be a good idea to also state exactly what you want to explain to that audience, or to inform them of, or to persuade them about.

Writing at Work

Many of the documents you produce at work target a particular audience for a particular purpose. You may find that it is highly advantageous to know as much as you can about your target audience and to prepare your message to reach that audience, even if the audience is a coworker or your boss. Menu language is a common example. Descriptions like “organic romaine” and “free-range chicken” are intended to appeal to a certain type of customer though perhaps not to the same customer who craves a thick steak. Similarly, mail-order companies research the demographics of the people who buy their merchandise. Successful vendors customize product descriptions in catalogs to appeal to their buyers’ tastes. For example, the product descriptions in a skateboarder catalog will differ from the descriptions in a clothing catalog for mature adults.

Using the topic for the essay that you outlined in Section 8.2 “Outlining” , describe your purpose and your audience as specifically as you can. Use your own sheet of paper to record your responses. Then keep these responses near you during future stages of the writing process.

My purpose: ____________________________________________

____________________________________________

My audience: ____________________________________________

Setting Goals for Your First Draft

A draft is a complete version of a piece of writing, but it is not the final version. The step in the writing process after drafting, as you may remember, is revising. During revising, you will have the opportunity to make changes to your first draft before you put the finishing touches on it during the editing and proofreading stage. A first draft gives you a working version that you can later improve.

Workplace writing in certain environments is done by teams of writers who collaborate on the planning, writing, and revising of documents, such as long reports, technical manuals, and the results of scientific research. Collaborators do not need to be in the same room, the same building, or even the same city. Many collaborations are conducted over the Internet.

In a perfect collaboration, each contributor has the right to add, edit, and delete text. Strong communication skills, in addition to strong writing skills, are important in this kind of writing situation because disagreements over style, content, process, emphasis, and other issues may arise.

The collaborative software, or document management systems, that groups use to work on common projects is sometimes called groupware or workgroup support systems.

The reviewing tool on some word-processing programs also gives you access to a collaborative tool that many smaller workgroups use when they exchange documents. You can also use it to leave comments to yourself.

If you invest some time now to investigate how the reviewing tool in your word processor works, you will be able to use it with confidence during the revision stage of the writing process. Then, when you start to revise, set your reviewing tool to track any changes you make, so you will be able to tinker with text and commit only those final changes you want to keep.

Discovering the Basic Elements of a First Draft

If you have been using the information in this chapter step by step to help you develop an assignment, you already have both a formal topic outline and a formal sentence outline to direct your writing. Knowing what a first draft looks like will help you make the creative leap from the outline to the first draft. A first draft should include the following elements:

• An introduction that piques the audience’s interest, tells what the essay is about, and motivates readers to keep reading.
• A thesis statement that presents the main point, or controlling idea, of the entire piece of writing.
• A topic sentence in each paragraph that states the main idea of the paragraph and implies how that main idea connects to the thesis statement.
• Supporting sentences in each paragraph that develop or explain the topic sentence. These can be specific facts, examples, anecdotes, or other details that elaborate on the topic sentence.
• A conclusion that reinforces the thesis statement and leaves the audience with a feeling of completion.

These elements follow the standard five-paragraph essay format, which you probably first encountered in high school. This basic format is valid for most essays you will write in college, even much longer ones. For now, however, Mariah focuses on writing the three body paragraphs from her outline. Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” covers writing introductions and conclusions, and you will read Mariah’s introduction and conclusion in Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” .

The Role of Topic Sentences

Topic sentences make the structure of a text and the writer’s basic arguments easy to locate and comprehend. In college writing, using a topic sentence in each paragraph of the essay is the standard rule. However, the topic sentence does not always have to be the first sentence in your paragraph even if it the first item in your formal outline.

When you begin to draft your paragraphs, you should follow your outline fairly closely. After all, you spent valuable time developing those ideas. However, as you begin to express your ideas in complete sentences, it might strike you that the topic sentence might work better at the end of the paragraph or in the middle. Try it. Writing a draft, by its nature, is a good time for experimentation.

The topic sentence can be the first, middle, or final sentence in a paragraph. The assignment’s audience and purpose will often determine where a topic sentence belongs. When the purpose of the assignment is to persuade, for example, the topic sentence should be the first sentence in a paragraph. In a persuasive essay, the writer’s point of view should be clearly expressed at the beginning of each paragraph.

Choosing where to position the topic sentence depends not only on your audience and purpose but also on the essay’s arrangement, or order. When you organize information according to order of importance, the topic sentence may be the final sentence in a paragraph. All the supporting sentences build up to the topic sentence. Chronological order may also position the topic sentence as the final sentence because the controlling idea of the paragraph may make the most sense at the end of a sequence.

When you organize information according to spatial order, a topic sentence may appear as the middle sentence in a paragraph. An essay arranged by spatial order often contains paragraphs that begin with descriptions. A reader may first need a visual in his or her mind before understanding the development of the paragraph. When the topic sentence is in the middle, it unites the details that come before it with the ones that come after it.

As you read critically throughout the writing process, keep topic sentences in mind. You may discover topic sentences that are not always located at the beginning of a paragraph. For example, fiction writers customarily use topic ideas, either expressed or implied, to move readers through their texts. In nonfiction writing, such as popular magazines, topic sentences are often used when the author thinks it is appropriate (based on the audience and the purpose, of course). A single topic sentence might even control the development of a number of paragraphs. For more information on topic sentences, please see Chapter 6 “Writing Paragraphs: Separating Ideas and Shaping Content” .

Developing topic sentences and thinking about their placement in a paragraph will prepare you to write the rest of the paragraph.

The paragraph is the main structural component of an essay as well as other forms of writing. Each paragraph of an essay adds another related main idea to support the writer’s thesis, or controlling idea. Each related main idea is supported and developed with facts, examples, and other details that explain it. By exploring and refining one main idea at a time, writers build a strong case for their thesis.

Paragraph Length

How long should a paragraph be?

One answer to this important question may be “long enough”—long enough for you to address your points and explain your main idea. To grab attention or to present succinct supporting ideas, a paragraph can be fairly short and consist of two to three sentences. A paragraph in a complex essay about some abstract point in philosophy or archaeology can be three-quarters of a page or more in length. As long as the writer maintains close focus on the topic and does not ramble, a long paragraph is acceptable in college-level writing. In general, try to keep the paragraphs longer than one sentence but shorter than one full page of double-spaced text.

Journalistic style often calls for brief two- or three-sentence paragraphs because of how people read the news, both online and in print. Blogs and other online information sources often adopt this paragraphing style, too. Readers often skim the first paragraphs of a great many articles before settling on the handful of stories they want to read in detail.

You may find that a particular paragraph you write may be longer than one that will hold your audience’s interest. In such cases, you should divide the paragraph into two or more shorter paragraphs, adding a topic statement or some kind of transitional word or phrase at the start of the new paragraph. Transition words or phrases show the connection between the two ideas.

In all cases, however, be guided by what you instructor wants and expects to find in your draft. Many instructors will expect you to develop a mature college-level style as you progress through the semester’s assignments.

To build your sense of appropriate paragraph length, use the Internet to find examples of the following items. Copy them into a file, identify your sources, and present them to your instructor with your annotations, or notes.

• A news article written in short paragraphs. Take notes on, or annotate, your selection with your observations about the effect of combining paragraphs that develop the same topic idea. Explain how effective those paragraphs would be.
• A long paragraph from a scholarly work that you identify through an academic search engine. Annotate it with your observations about the author’s paragraphing style.

Starting Your First Draft

Now we are finally ready to look over Mariah’s shoulder as she begins to write her essay about digital technology and the confusing choices that consumers face. As she does, you should have in front of you your outline, with its thesis statement and topic sentences, and the notes you wrote earlier in this lesson on your purpose and audience. Reviewing these will put both you and Mariah in the proper mind-set to start.

The following is Mariah’s thesis statement.

Here are the notes that Mariah wrote to herself to characterize her purpose and audience.

Mariah chose to begin by writing a quick introduction based on her thesis statement. She knew that she would want to improve her introduction significantly when she revised. Right now, she just wanted to give herself a starting point. You will read her introduction again in Section 8.4 “Revising and Editing” when she revises it.

Remember Mariah’s other options. She could have started directly with any of the body paragraphs.

You will learn more about writing attention-getting introductions and effective conclusions in Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” .

With her thesis statement and her purpose and audience notes in front of her, Mariah then looked at her sentence outline. She chose to use that outline because it includes the topic sentences. The following is the portion of her outline for the first body paragraph. The roman numeral II identifies the topic sentence for the paragraph, capital letters indicate supporting details, and arabic numerals label subpoints.

Mariah then began to expand the ideas in her outline into a paragraph. Notice how the outline helped her guarantee that all her sentences in the body of the paragraph develop the topic sentence.

If you write your first draft on the computer, consider creating a new file folder for each course with a set of subfolders inside the course folders for each assignment you are given. Label the folders clearly with the course names, and label each assignment folder and word processing document with a title that you will easily recognize. The assignment name is a good choice for the document. Then use that subfolder to store all the drafts you create. When you start each new draft, do not just write over the last one. Instead, save the draft with a new tag after the title—draft 1, draft 2, and so on—so that you will have a complete history of drafts in case your instructor wishes you to submit them.

In your documents, observe any formatting requirements—for margins, headers, placement of page numbers, and other layout matters—that your instructor requires.

Study how Mariah made the transition from her sentence outline to her first draft. First, copy her outline onto your own sheet of paper. Leave a few spaces between each part of the outline. Then copy sentences from Mariah’s paragraph to align each sentence with its corresponding entry in her outline.

Continuing the First Draft

Mariah continued writing her essay, moving to the second and third body paragraphs. She had supporting details but no numbered subpoints in her outline, so she had to consult her prewriting notes for specific information to include.

If you decide to take a break between finishing your first body paragraph and starting the next one, do not start writing immediately when you return to your work. Put yourself back in context and in the mood by rereading what you have already written. This is what Mariah did. If she had stopped writing in the middle of writing the paragraph, she could have jotted down some quick notes to herself about what she would write next.

Preceding each body paragraph that Mariah wrote is the appropriate section of her sentence outline. Notice how she expanded roman numeral III from her outline into a first draft of the second body paragraph. As you read, ask yourself how closely she stayed on purpose and how well she paid attention to the needs of her audience.

Mariah then began her third and final body paragraph using roman numeral IV from her outline.

Reread body paragraphs two and three of the essay that Mariah is writing. Then answer the questions on your own sheet of paper.

• In body paragraph two, Mariah decided to develop her paragraph as a nonfiction narrative. Do you agree with her decision? Explain. How else could she have chosen to develop the paragraph? Why is that better?
• Compare the writing styles of paragraphs two and three. What evidence do you have that Mariah was getting tired or running out of steam? What advice would you give her? Why?
• Choose one of these two body paragraphs. Write a version of your own that you think better fits Mariah’s audience and purpose.

Writing a Title

A writer’s best choice for a title is one that alludes to the main point of the entire essay. Like the headline in a newspaper or the big, bold title in a magazine, an essay’s title gives the audience a first peek at the content. If readers like the title, they are likely to keep reading.

Following her outline carefully, Mariah crafted each paragraph of her essay. Moving step by step in the writing process, Mariah finished the draft and even included a brief concluding paragraph (you will read her conclusion in Chapter 9 “Writing Essays: From Start to Finish” ). She then decided, as the final touch for her writing session, to add an engaging title.

Writing Your Own First Draft

Now you may begin your own first draft, if you have not already done so. Follow the suggestions and the guidelines presented in this section.

Key Takeaways

• Make the writing process work for you. Use any and all of the strategies that help you move forward in the writing process.
• Always be aware of your purpose for writing and the needs of your audience. Cater to those needs in every sensible way.
• Remember to include all the key structural parts of an essay: a thesis statement that is part of your introductory paragraph, three or more body paragraphs as described in your outline, and a concluding paragraph. Then add an engaging title to draw in readers.
• Write paragraphs of an appropriate length for your writing assignment. Paragraphs in college-level writing can be a page long, as long as they cover the main topics in your outline.
• Use your topic outline or your sentence outline to guide the development of your paragraphs and the elaboration of your ideas. Each main idea, indicated by a roman numeral in your outline, becomes the topic of a new paragraph. Develop it with the supporting details and the subpoints of those details that you included in your outline.
• Generally speaking, write your introduction and conclusion last, after you have fleshed out the body paragraphs.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Writing a Paper: Drafting

Drafting refers to actually writing the words of the paper. As part of the writing process, you will write multiple drafts of your paper. Each rough draft improves upon the previous one. The final draft is simply the last draft that you submit.

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How long does a first draft have to be if the essay i'm writing is 300 words long?

I keep trying to figure out how long the first draft has to be if the essay is 300 words long. Please respond if you know!

• maybe so i don't know –  Brenna Nov 5, 2017 at 23:58
• 1 My experience of writing academic papers is it's better to write more than you need and edit it down to the limit. The chances are that when you write a paper you'll include some stuff that's less relevant than the rest so if you have more on the page then you need you can use relevance as the deciding factor in what stays and what gets cut –  GordonM Nov 7, 2017 at 11:45
• Is the 300 words a hard limit? Is this for a class or some sort of exam? –  David Thornley Nov 2, 2018 at 17:47

5 Answers 5

As long as it needs to be to get your points across.

There's no formula, saying that your first draft has to cut x% of words.

Plan your essay out in advance; identify your points - write your argument to with the word count in mind, then use your draft to tidy it up.

• 1 Actually, I have heard somewhere that during editing you should cut at least 10% of your writing, so that would put the first draft of a 300 word essay at 333 words. I agree though that what you actually have to cut depends on the point you want to get across rather than some number. –  B Altmann Nov 6, 2017 at 8:40
• 2 If that works for you then go for it. Seems like just plain bad advice to me, or advice that someone trying to sell you their 5 step guide to writing a best seller would say. Write the first draft to get everything out. Then go back over it and remove what needs to be removed and refine what needs to be refined. Whether that's 10% or 50% it's going to vary from piece to piece –  user18397 Nov 6, 2017 at 11:48
• I still think it can be useful to have a (very rough) idea about how much usually gets cut between edits. For example, I decided my novel should probably be no longer than 80k words. I'm at about 25% of my story and I'm already at 25k words. As a first time writer, that gets me nervous. But knowing that reaching 90k words in your first draft for a 80k words novel isn't crazy gives me a lot of confidence in what I'm doing. –  B Altmann Nov 7, 2017 at 16:34

There's no hard and fast rule, and it depends how many drafts you're thinking of doing before the final version.

If this is the only draft, I would aim higher than the limit. If there will be second or third (etc.) drafts, the first draft is whatever gets your ideas in writing.

[I tend to think of a first draft as a summary, which expands into a longer second draft, which is cut for the third, which might be the final version (but often isn't). I wouldn't do fewer than two draft versions, but that's just what works for me.]

There is no one perfect answer to this. If your process isn't being evaluated, the only important thing is the final draft. Whatever steps you need to take to get there will vary from person to person.

However, if you are writing this for a class and your rough draft is going to be reviewed, then the word count may very well matter. The problem is, the only person who knows for sure if the word count matters and what the parameters are is the reviewer (most likely a teacher or professor). If you cannot ask them, I recommend writing 300 words, just to be safe.

What kind of a writer are you?

I tend to write more than I need, then I hone the work in the editing process. So for a 300 word essay, I would probably first write a draft of 600 words. I wouldn't double every draft I write, it's just that this is super short.

If you're someone who writes a solid outline first then slowly fleshes it out, then your first draft might be 200 words, because you'll add to it in the editing process.

The correct answer though is: The length your teacher thinks it should be.

You should really act like how you feel. There are no specific guidelines for how many words on your draft or what word count. Just write everything, finish it and then start the editing (I’d better wait overnight). See if all the parts fit in the essay and if not, get them out. If they slow you down, then don't write them. It should be fun to write, not restraining you.

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A clear, arguable thesis will tell your readers where you are going to end up, but it can also help you figure out how to get them there. Put your thesis at the top of a blank page and then make a list of the points you will need to make to argue that thesis effectively.

For example, consider this example from the thesis handout : While Sandel argues persuasively that our instinct to “remake”(54) ourselves into something ever more perfect is a problem, his belief that we can always draw a line between what is medically necessary and what makes us simply “better than well”(51) is less convincing.

To argue this thesis, the author needs to do the following:

• Show what is persuasive about Sandel’s claims about the problems with striving for perfection.
• Show what is not convincing about Sandel’s claim that we can clearly distinguish between medically necessary enhancements and other enhancements.

Once you have broken down your thesis into main claims, you can then think about what sub-claims you will need to make in order to support each of those main claims. That step might look like this:

• Evidence that Sandel provides to support this claim
• Discussion of why this evidence is convincing even in light of potential counterarguments
• Discussion of cases when medically necessary enhancement and non-medical enhancement cannot be easily distinguished
• Analysis of what those cases mean for Sandel’s argument
• Consideration of counterarguments (what Sandel might say in response to this section of your argument)

Each argument you will make in an essay will be different, but this strategy will often be a useful first step in figuring out the path of your argument.  

Strategy #2: Use subheadings, even if you remove them later  

Scientific papers generally include standard subheadings to delineate different sections of the paper, including “introduction,” “methods,” and “discussion.” Even when you are not required to use subheadings, it can be helpful to put them into an early draft to help you see what you’ve written and to begin to think about how your ideas fit together. You can do this by typing subheadings above the sections of your draft.

If you’re having trouble figuring out how your ideas fit together, try beginning with informal subheadings like these:

• Introduction  
• Explain the author’s main point  
• Show why this main point doesn’t hold up when we consider this other example  
• Explain the implications of what I’ve shown for our understanding of the author  
• Show how that changes our understanding of the topic

For longer papers, you may decide to include subheadings to guide your reader through your argument. In those cases, you would need to revise your informal subheadings to be more useful for your readers. For example, if you have initially written in something like “explain the author’s main point,” your final subheading might be something like “Sandel’s main argument” or “Sandel’s opposition to genetic enhancement.” In other cases, once you have the key pieces of your argument in place, you will be able to remove the subheadings.  

Strategy #3: Create a reverse outline from your draft  

While you may have learned to outline a paper before writing a draft, this step is often difficult because our ideas develop as we write. In some cases, it can be more helpful to write a draft in which you get all of your ideas out and then do a “reverse outline” of what you’ve already written. This doesn’t have to be formal; you can just make a list of the point in each paragraph of your draft and then ask these questions:

• Are those points in an order that makes sense to you?  
• Are there gaps in your argument?  
• Do the topic sentences of the paragraphs clearly state these main points?  
• Do you have more than one paragraph that focuses on the same point? If so, do you need both paragraphs?  
• Do you have some paragraphs that include too many points? If so, would it make more sense to split them up?  
• Do you make points near the end of the draft that would be more effective earlier in your paper?  
• Are there points missing from this draft?  
• picture_as_pdf Tips for Organizing Your Essay

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Using the Drafting Process in Academic Writing

2-minute read

• 28th February 2015

You might have been working on an essay for ages, or perhaps you’ve knocked out something short in an afternoon. But how do you move from a first to a final, polished draft? Read on to find out!

Starting Out…

Firstly, get the thing written! Don’t procrastinate! Just get on and start writing! Even just doing a little bit every day can quickly add up.

Remember that your first draft is only ever going to be a rough sketch of the final essay. This is why you should leave plenty of time for revising and refining your work!

The Drafting Process

Step one – delete.

Once you have a complete draft, go back over what you have written looking for any errors, repetition or over-long sentences.

It can help at this point to print out your work, as this is easier on your eyes and will help you to spot mistakes you might miss on a computer screen.

Step Two – Rewrite

Look for ways in which things could be said more precisely or succinctly. Try to be as concise as possible and make sure each paragraph flows into the next so your reader can follow your argument. It can help to make notes about the structure of your argument as you go.

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Step Three – Check

Go through and make sure all of your references are correctly formatted (see your university style guide for details on this) and that every source you cite in your essay is included in your reference list. It may seem dull, but you will earn extra marks for a well-referenced essay!

Step Four – Check Again!

Read your essay through several times on paper. Make notes and corrections as you go. You could even try starting from the end and reading backwards, a sentence at a time.

This might seem odd, but being too familiar with the content of your essay will make it harder to find errors. Reading your essay backwards, on the other hand, allows you to see it anew and thus helps you to spot mistakes.

Step Five – Check for the Final Time

Before submitting, make sure you get someone else to read your essay through. Your best option is almost certainly a professional  proofreader, so why not get in touch today?

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Drafting is the stage of the writing process in which you put all of your prewriting and organizing ideas into sentences and paragraphs. The aim in drafting at first should be to write the bulk of the essay in a rough form, without worrying much about revisions and edits (which are later steps in the writing process).

The point of prewriting and organizing was to make this stage of drafting more manageable. If you take prewriting and organizing seriously, you already have notes and plan about what you need to draft. If you failed to prewrite and organize, you might be facing the terror of the blank page, which can tempt writers into trying to construct a final draft from nothing–a very bad idea. So take prewriting and organizing seriously to help make this stage of the writing process as effective as possible.

Making the Writing Process Work for You

What makes the writing process so beneficial to writers is that it encourages alternatives to standard practices while motivating you to develop your best ideas. For instance, the following approaches, done alone or in combination with others, may improve your writing and help you move forward in the writing process:

• Start with the body paragraphs. A common error is to start drafting an essay at the introduction since that’s the first paragraph in a final draft, but you cannot effectively introduce something you do not yet know. You can’t introduce someone at a social gathering if you have no idea who that person is, and you can’t effectively introduce body paragraphs that you haven’t drafted yet. So draft several body paragraphs before going back and creating an introduction that discusses them.
• Begin writing with the part you know the most about. You can start with the third paragraph in your outline if ideas come easily to mind. You can start with the second paragraph or the first paragraph, too. Although paragraphs may vary in length, keep in mind that short paragraphs may contain insufficient support. Readers may also think the writing is abrupt. Long paragraphs may be wordy and may lose your reader’s interest. As a guideline, try to write paragraphs longer than one sentence but shorter than the length of an entire double-spaced page.
• Write one paragraph at a time and then stop. As long as you complete the assignment on time, you may choose how many paragraphs you complete in one sitting. Pace yourself. On the other hand, try not to procrastinate. Writers should always meet their deadlines.
• Take short breaks to refresh your mind. This tip might be most useful if you are writing a multi-page report or essay. Still, if you are antsy or cannot concentrate, take a break to let your mind rest. But do not let breaks extend too long. If you spend too much time away from your essay, you may have trouble starting again. You may forget key points or lose momentum. Try setting an alarm to limit your break, and when the time is up, return to your desk to write.
• Be reasonable with your goals. If you decide to take ten-minute breaks, try to stick to that goal. If you told yourself that you need more facts, then commit to finding them. Holding yourself to your own goals will create successful writing assignments.
• Keep your audience and purpose in mind as you write. These aspects of writing are just as important when you are writing a single paragraph for your essay as when you are considering the direction of the entire essay.

Of all of these considerations, keeping your purpose and your audience at the front of your mind is the most important key to writing success.

Your purpose will guide your mind as you compose your sentences. Your audience will guide word choice. Are you writing for experts, for a general audience, for other college students, or for people who know very little about your topic? Keep asking yourself what your readers, with their background and experience, need to be told in order to understand your ideas. How can you best express your ideas so they are totally clear and your communication is effective?

Using a subject of your choosing (such as one you have outlined in previous exercises), describe your purpose and your audience as specifically as you can. Keep these responses near you during future stages of the writing process.

My purpose: ____________________________________________

____________________________________________

My audience: ____________________________________________

The Basic Elements of a First Draft

If you have been using the information in this chapter step by step to help you develop an assignment, you already have both a formal topic outline and a formal sentence outline to direct your writing. Knowing what a first draft looks like will help you make the creative leap from the outline to the first draft. A first draft should include the following elements:

• An introduction that clearly identifies the subject, the thesis, and the main ideas to come (in the order that they will appear).
• A thesis statement that presents the main claim of the entire piece of writing.
• A topic sentence in each paragraph that states the main point of the paragraph and implies how that main point connects to the thesis statement.
• Supporting sentences in each paragraph that develop or explain the topic sentence. These can be reasons, specific examples, explanations, comparisons, facts, or other strategies that help support the main points and the thesis.
• A conclusion that emphasizes the most important ideas and interpretations.

See the chapter Paragraphs for information on topic sentences and other key parts of a paragraph. See the chapter Essays for more information on thesis statements and other key parts of an essay.

Examples of Starting a Draft

Now we are finally ready to look over Mariah’s shoulder as she begins to write her essay about digital technology and the confusing choices that consumers face. As she does, you should have in front of you your outline, with its thesis statement and topic sentences, and the notes you wrote earlier in this lesson on your purpose and audience. Reviewing these will put both you and Mariah in the proper mind-set to start.

The following is Mariah’s thesis statement.

Here are the notes that Mariah wrote to herself to characterize her purpose and audience.

Mariah chose to begin by writing a quick introduction based on her thesis statement. She knew that she would want to improve her introduction significantly when she revised. Right now, she just wanted to give herself a starting point.

With her thesis statement and her purpose and audience notes in front of her, Mariah then looked at her sentence outline. She chose to use that outline because it includes the topic sentences. The following is the portion of her outline for the first body paragraph. The Roman numeral II identifies the topic sentence for the paragraph, capital letters indicate supporting details, and Arabic numerals label subpoints.

Mariah then began to expand the ideas in her outline into a paragraph. Notice how the outline helped her guarantee that all her sentences in the body of the paragraph develop the topic sentence.

When you make major changes to a draft, save the different version as a different document with a different title—such as draft 1, draft 2, and so on—so that you will have a complete history of drafts. This can come in handy when later changing your mind about a direction you went with a draft.

Study how Mariah made the transition from her sentence outline to her first draft. First, copy her outline onto your own sheet of paper. Leave a few spaces between each part of the outline. Then copy sentences from Mariah’s paragraph to align each sentence with its corresponding entry in her outline.

Examples of Continuing a Draft

Mariah continued writing her essay, moving to the second and third body paragraphs. She had supporting details but no numbered subpoints in her outline, so she had to consult her prewriting notes for specific information to include.

If you decide to take a break between finishing your first body paragraph and starting the next one, do not start writing immediately when you return to your work. Put yourself back in context and in the mood by rereading what you have already written. This is what Mariah did. If she had stopped writing in the middle of writing the paragraph, she could have jotted down some quick notes to herself about what she would write next.

Preceding each body paragraph that Mariah wrote is the appropriate section of her sentence outline. Notice how she expanded Roman numeral III from her outline into a first draft of the second body paragraph. As you read, ask yourself how closely she stayed on purpose and how well she paid attention to the needs of her audience.

Mariah then began her third and final body paragraph using Roman numeral IV from her outline.

Re-read body paragraphs two and three of the essay that Mariah is writing.

• In body paragraph two, Mariah decided to develop her paragraph as a nonfiction narrative. Do you agree with her decision? Explain. How else could she have chosen to develop the paragraph? Why is that better?
• Compare the writing styles of paragraphs two and three. What evidence do you have that Mariah was getting tired or running out of steam? What advice would you give her? Why?
• Choose one of these two body paragraphs. Write a version of your own that you think better fits Mariah’s audience and purpose.

The Writing Textbook Copyright © 2021 by Josh Woods, editor and contributor, as well as an unnamed author (by request from the original publisher), and other authors named separately is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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A rough draft is an initial version of a piece of writing that serves as a starting point for further revision. When writing a draft, you don't need to focus too much on grammar, style, or perfect structure. The purpose of a rough draft is to get thoughts down on paper and prepare a foundation for the final version of your writing.

An excellent essay is not written in one go; it has many rough drafts behind it. What's a secret to writing a powerful sketch? In fact, there is no secret. It's just a matter of knowing how to organize your ideas correctly. Read on and you’ll find out how to sketch your perfect final piece and get essay help .

What Is Rough Draft: Meaning

The rough draft is your very first attempt to put text on paper. It is expected to be basic, imperfect, and incomplete. But at the same time, it is a piece of essential information for the final version. Don't be afraid to make grammatical mistakes, incorrect words, or confusing structure.  The idea is writing down all your thoughts in an outline. And you can correct errors at the very end.

What Is the Purpose of Rough Draft?

What is the focus and purpose of writing a rough draft? Drafts help you catch an idea and finish your essay on time. This is precisely a tool that is needed when fearing blank slate. It should not be perfect; it just should be as it is.  Its ultimate goal is getting your ideas across and giving yourself a boost to start writing. Preparing your work becomes much easier after you have your first sketch. But just writing an essay without it can take a lot of time. Using an outline, you can see what is missing and what can be changed. According to professional college essay writing service , flaws or plot holes can be avoided even before  material is written.

Rough Draft: What to Include

What should be included in your first draft? Draft helps you with an initial version of your final paper. So it should contain all sections that a usual essay has. However, this sketch is for you only, and no one will read it. Therefore, no one will mind if you modify it for yourself. You can skip some sections. But keep in mind that in your final work, everything should be according to  instructions.  If you are interested in what should be in your finished version of an essay, we suggest that you look through our article or order essay from experts.

How to Write Rough Draft: 5 Main Steps

Now let's take a look at how to write a rough draft. This is often the most extended and most laborious part of essay writing preparation.  The purpose is to complete actual content writing. We have prepared a guide, thanks to which you can organize your ideas in just 5 steps!

Step 1: Brainstorming Ideas for the Draft

Brainstorming is the beginning step in writing a draft. This is very important for identifying  ideas and content that you want to build your copy around.  Don't worry about structure or spelling. Just write whatever comes to mind. Do not neglect this step whether you are writing a thesis paper or a fiction book. Take a piece of paper or create a new word document on your computer. At the top, write your main topic. Then set a timer for 10 minutes and start writing whatever comes to mind. There is no need to reread what you have printed or to correct something. Just keep on writing. Then, underline or highlight phrases and sentences that could be used for a story. As you go through the following steps, you may have more ideas. But always start by jotting down as many ideas as possible.

Step 2: Do Prewriting

To start your rough draft essay, ask yourself six important questions. Take a new sheet of paper or create a new word document. Write the main story topic at top. Then answer 6 main questions in free-write form:

Now reread your answers. Perhaps you answered some questions with several sentences and left some unanswered. That may be the basis for your essay.

Step 3: Create an Outline

After brainstorming and attempts at writing first words, here comes a rough draft outline! It helps structure your content and put all of your previous work in logical form. Consider outline as a general plan for your broad sketch. This is just a picture of how everything will develop.

Step 4: Start Where You Want

How to start a rough draft? Don't be afraid to start your draft in the middle. This is especially useful if you keep thinking of a great first paragraph. Maybe you will begin with body paragraph parts. Starting in the middle will help you find proper words. You can also write conclusions first. Complete your introductory paragraph last. Then your introduction will be based on the context of your entire composition.

Step 5: Read Over and Revise Rough Draft

The final step of an essay rough draft is editing. This phase helps to polish all shortcomings and inaccuracies that you left while writing. Next, you need to thoroughly read a text. Edit any grammatical and spelling mistakes to get a final look. Well, that's all, done! Speaking about essay revision , we have a useful blog with all the necessary tips. Follow all the steps we advise.

How Long Should a Rough Draft Be?

Rough draft length should not differ much from final work's length. You can rewrite your drafts multiple times. This will help you choose the most suitable material from all options. This process gives you the ability to select from more comfortable material. Don't be afraid to change your ideas, because, in the end, you will still only leave the most suitable option.

How to Create Rough Draft: Helpful Tips

So, you start creating your first rough draft paper. Now we'll quickly give you the most critical advice when writing draft:

• Allow yourself to write imperfectly! As we said, your goal is to present all ideas. Don't worry about making mistakes. Don't expect perfection the first time.
• Focus on setting your raw ideas. Follow your plan. Don't be afraid to include new ideas. Draft can be your inspiration!
• Don't concentrate on finding the right word. Don't check your grammar for correctness. Instead, focus on the big picture.

Rough Draft Example

It is hard to provide only one essay rough draft example. Sketches can include so many different aspects. Let's quickly take a look at what they could be:

• It can be written entirely but with confusing ideas.
• It can be written in slang or shorthand, with hints to add content later.
• It can be written barely, but it outlines the central vision.
• It may be a masterpiece that looks like the final product. But some fragments of information may be irrelevant.

If you worry how your plan should look like, here is also a system called TEER:

• Thesis Here you state the idea and get attention.
• Example Provide life support for your view.
• Evidence Here you scientifically prove your thesis.
• Relevance statement Wrap up your essay with a description of why it is significant.

Rough Draft: Bottom Line

A rough draft is a sketch of your future essay.  It is critical for writing a successful paper. We've described how to write a draft in 5 steps together with tips and examples. So you are ready to try writing the best draft for your academic work. 

Yes, draft is essential in writing an essay. But you don't have to worry about it at all. Just say ‘ write my college essay ’ and order the whole academic paper from us. Our professional writers will do everything quickly and at the highest level.

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

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It’s not unusual to finish a draft and be short of the length requirement.  Drafting helps us get our thoughts on the page, allowing us to see what we know and don’t know.  Writers often find gaps in their thinking after completing a draft.  That’s why they continue to write drafts until they’re satisfied with what they have on the page.  Consider some of the following advice if you find yourself needing to increase your word count.

For Argumentative/Research Papers

• Read back over your assignment prompt to make sure you’ve fulfilled all requirements.
• Look for places to expand and clarify your ideas.  We recommend that you have someone read your paper in order to see if he or she finds parts of the paper confusing or underdeveloped.
• Revisit your sources to see if they contain some additional insight or information that could strengthen your argument.
• Make sure you have taken time to properly introduce and discuss your sources.  Sometimes, for example, we quote sources without giving information about who or what we are quoting and without giving an explanation of what the quote means and how that quote fits into our argument.
• Consider adding more evidence to further support your argument or details to help your reader see things more clearly through your eyes.
• Talk to your instructor.  Maybe you have already met the goals of the assignments.

For Creative or Personal Pieces

• If you’re writing a creative piece (non-fiction or fiction), you might take a look at the different elements of your story to see if you need to clarify or add more detail.  Is your setting vivid—can readers place the action of the story?  Are your characters’ personalities and actions understandable to readers?  Do your characters engage in meaningful dialogue?  Does your plot follow a logical order—does the plot hold together?
• For personal narratives, since your readers didn’t personally experience what you’re writing about, you need to make sure that you are detailed enough to help readers understand the idea or experience you are trying to convey. Your readers can only envision what you show them directly in your details. For that reason, you might consider some of the above advice regarding elements of a story as these elements are often important in personal narrative writing as well.
• Also, when writing a personal narrative, you might consider whether you should include a detailed reflection about the significance of the experience you are sharing.  These reflections can be placed anywhere in the narrative, and they ultimately help you make sense of the experiences featured in your writing.
• Personal statements for graduate programs, petitions, and scholarships may require a different approach in terms of expanding the word count.  While meeting the length requirement is not usually a challenge given how short personal statements typically are, you might consider adding more details and examples to support the claims you are making about yourself.  For example, if you tell the reader that you are a team player, give a detailed example that shows readers that you actually have that attribute.  Supporting the claims about yourself with actual evidence will not only lengthen your statement but it will also help you be more persuasive with your reader.

What can the Writing Center do to help?

Writing Center consultants can be effective readers in these situations, as they will raise questions that may lead you to expand on or add ideas to your text.  Also, our consultants can help you determine whether you have met the requirements for the assignment.

Additional Resources

The Writing Center can help you locate source material, but we also recommend that you make an appointment with a research librarian , who will teach you strategies and provide you with resources that will help you locate quality information on your topic.

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4b. Drafting

Drafting is the point in the writing process at which you compose a complete first version of an essay. There are as many ways to write a first draft as there are essays in the world. Some academic writers begin their drafts with body paragraphs and work backwards to their introduction while others feel the need to develop a solid introduction before launching into the body of the essay.  The best advice offered by most professional writers is to try not to worry too much about how unprepared, disorganized, repetitive, or uninspired a first draft might feel because relatively few of us can sit down and compose an entire essay (or even email) that is ready to be published in a single draft.  As students, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the books and articles we read for class have been revised and edited many times and with the support of many people prior to publication. Your instructors will expect you to perform the role of both writer and editor before turning in your final draft.

As you dive into the drafting stage of the writing process, the following advice may come in handy when you are facing the pressure of deadlines and grades:

Begin with the part of your essay you know the most about or feel least nervous about.

• Having an outline allows you to start with the third, fifth, or second paragraph of an essay without worrying how it will flow with the rest. Your initial paragraphs may vary in length or contain insufficient reasoning or evidence as you draft. Topic sentences, transitions, and other details can be cleaned up later. Be sure to cite sources even if you’re unsure what quotation or other evidence you might include to reduce your formatting time later (and help you avoid unintentional plagiarism).

Just do it!

• Hesitation can be a writer’s worst enemy. Facing a blank page can feel like a climbing to the top of a diving platform and being too wary to jump or being unable to choose a restaurant for dinner.  Although every good writer should be self-critical at times, try to remember that a first draft can be terrible and still be very useful. Try not to look back or doubt your ideas – there will be time for that later. Treat your drafting sessions like freewriting and do not worry about transitions, spelling, punctuation, and other mechanics.

Leave yourself a short note or comment at the end of each writing session .

• Every writer has picked up something they wrote a day or week ago and wondered what the heck they were thinking. Take an extra minute at the end of a writing session to leave yourself a short note or comment to remind yourself where you hope to pick up or anything you need to look up. Notes and comments can also be useful if you feel a sentence in your paragraph may be tangential or incomplete and you want to come back to it later.

Pace yourself and take breaks .

• Essays take time to develop. Hopefully, you can find a place to write where you are comfortable and able to avoid distractions. Turn off your phone and try not to have an internet browser open unless citing evidence.

Be reasonable with your goals .

• Begin each writing session by taking a moment to consider how long you plan to write and what you hope to accomplish. Plan breaks to stretch and rehydrate. Holding yourself to a goal for each session will help you stay on track toward your deadlines and give you a sense of achievement. Rewarding yourself after each successful writing session can be useful motivation as well.

Keep your audience, purpose, and task requirements in mind .

• By the time we get several paragraphs or hours into a writing task, we can become so attached to our own ideas and writing style that we lose track of our audience and purpose. Asking yourself “who will be reading this essay?” and “how will it be assessed?” or “what is my overall purpose?” can help you keep an eye on the big picture. Checking assignment guidelines will help guide your work and help you ensure that your draft meets an instructor or editor’s expectations.

The Value of First Drafts

A first draft is a complete version of a piece of writing, but it is certainly not expected to be the final version. During the revision stage, you will have the opportunity to make all kinds of changes to your first draft before you put the final touches on it during the editing stage. A first draft gives you a complete working version of an essay that is ready to share with peers, writing coaches, instructors, and/or editors that can be improved with revision and editing.

Writing as Inquiry Copyright © 2021 by Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Steps for Writing a First Draft of an Essay

• Take a closer look at your assignment and the topic if it was given to you by your instructor. Revise your outline as well. This is needed for your clearer understanding of the tasks you must accomplish within the draft, and to make sure you meet the requirements of the assignment.
• Sketch out the introduction of your essay. At this point, don’t get stalled on form; introductory part should inform readers about what the topic is, and state your point of view according to this topic. The introduction should also be interesting to read to capture readers’ attention, but this task has more to do with thoughtful and scrupulous writing, and thus should be left for later.
• Based on your outline, start transferring your ideas to paper. The main task here is to give them the initial form and set a general direction for their further development, and not to write a full paper.
• Chalk out the summarizing paragraph of your essay. It should not contain any new ideas, but briefly reintroduce those from the main body, and restate your thesis statement.
• Read through the draft to see if you have included the information you wanted to, but without making any further corrections, since this is a task for the second and final drafts.
• If you are not sure that you checked everything, send it out for proofreading. Searching through the best essay service reviews, you can get some recommendations of where to look.

Key Points to Consider

• While an outline is needed to decide on what to write, the first draft is more about answering a question: “How to write?” In the first draft, you shape your ideas out, and not simply name and list them, as you did in an outline.
• When you start writing your thoughts down, it may happen that one idea or concept sparks new connections, memories, or associations. Be attentive to such sidetracks; choose those of them that might be useful for your writing, and don’t delve in those that are undesirable in terms of the purpose of your paper (academic, showing opinion). A successful piece of writing is focused on its topic, and doesn’t include everything you have to say on a subject.
• Making notes for yourself in the margins or even in the middle of the text is a useful practice. This can save you time and keep you focused on the essence of your essay without being distracted by secondary details. For example, such notes could look like this: “As documented, the Vietnam War cost the United States about … (search for the exact sum of money and interpret it in terms of modern exchange rates) U. S. dollars.”
• When you finish crafting your first draft, it is useful to put it aside and completely quit thinking about writing for a certain period of time. Time away will allow you to have a fresh look at your draft when you decide to revise it.

Do and Don’t

Common Mistakes When Writing a First Draft of an Essay

– Editing and revising a draft in process of writing. If you stop after each sentence to think it over, you will most likely lose your flow; besides, many people have an internal editor  or critic  who can’t stand it if the material is written imperfectly. Therefore, first you should deal with the whole draft, and only after that proofread and edit it.

– Paying too much attention to secondary arguments, factual material, and other minor peculiarities. The main goal of the first draft is to sketch out your main ideas; you can fill it with details later. If you think you will forget about an important fact or remark, make brief notes in margins.

– Ignoring the role of a first draft in the essay writing process. Though it may seem you are wasting time working on a draft, you are working on the essay itself. You need to understand how your outline works in full written form.

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MLA General Format 

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

MLA Style specifies guidelines for formatting manuscripts and citing research in writing. MLA Style also provides writers with a system for referencing their sources through parenthetical citation in their essays and Works Cited pages. 

Writers who properly use MLA also build their credibility by demonstrating accountability to their source material. Most importantly, the use of MLA style can protect writers from accusations of plagiarism, which is the purposeful or accidental uncredited use of source material produced by other writers. 

If you are asked to use MLA format, be sure to consult the  MLA Handbook  (9th edition). Publishing scholars and graduate students should also consult the  MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing  (3rd edition). The  MLA Handbook  is available in most writing centers and reference libraries. It is also widely available in bookstores, libraries, and at the MLA web site. See the Additional Resources section of this page for a list of helpful books and sites about using MLA Style.

Paper Format

The preparation of papers and manuscripts in MLA Style is covered in part four of the  MLA Style Manual . Below are some basic guidelines for formatting a paper in  MLA Style :

General Guidelines

• Type your paper on a computer and print it out on standard, white 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
• Double-space the text of your paper and use a legible font (e.g. Times New Roman). Whatever font you choose, MLA recommends that the regular and italics type styles contrast enough that they are each distinct from one another. The font size should be 12 pt.
• Leave only one space after periods or other punctuation marks (unless otherwise prompted by your instructor).
• Set the margins of your document to 1 inch on all sides.
• Indent the first line of each paragraph one half-inch from the left margin. MLA recommends that you use the “Tab” key as opposed to pushing the space bar five times.
• Create a header that numbers all pages consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor may ask that you omit the number on your first page. Always follow your instructor's guidelines.)
• Use italics throughout your essay to indicate the titles of longer works and, only when absolutely necessary, provide emphasis.
• If you have any endnotes, include them on a separate page before your Works Cited page. Entitle the section Notes (centered, unformatted).

Formatting the First Page of Your Paper

• Do not make a title page for your paper unless specifically requested or the paper is assigned as a group project. In the case of a group project, list all names of the contributors, giving each name its own line in the header, followed by the remaining MLA header requirements as described below. Format the remainder of the page as requested by the instructor.
• In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, list your name, your instructor's name, the course, and the date. Again, be sure to use double-spaced text.
• Double space again and center the title. Do not underline, italicize, or place your title in quotation marks. Write the title in Title Case (standard capitalization), not in all capital letters.
• Use quotation marks and/or italics when referring to other works in your title, just as you would in your text. For example:  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas  as Morality Play; Human Weariness in "After Apple Picking"
• Double space between the title and the first line of the text.
• Create a header in the upper right-hand corner that includes your last name, followed by a space with a page number. Number all pages consecutively with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. (Note: Your instructor or other readers may ask that you omit the last name/page number header on your first page. Always follow instructor guidelines.)

Here is a sample of the first page of a paper in MLA style:

The First Page of an MLA Paper

Section Headings

Writers sometimes use section headings to improve a document’s readability. These sections may include individual chapters or other named parts of a book or essay.

MLA recommends that when dividing an essay into sections you number those sections with an Arabic number and a period followed by a space and the section name.

MLA does not have a prescribed system of headings for books (for more information on headings, please see page 146 in the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing , 3rd edition). If you are only using one level of headings, meaning that all of the sections are distinct and parallel and have no additional sections that fit within them, MLA recommends that these sections resemble one another grammatically. For instance, if your headings are typically short phrases, make all of the headings short phrases (and not, for example, full sentences). Otherwise, the formatting is up to you. It should, however, be consistent throughout the document.

If you employ multiple levels of headings (some of your sections have sections within sections), you may want to provide a key of your chosen level headings and their formatting to your instructor or editor.

Sample Section Headings

The following sample headings are meant to be used only as a reference. You may employ whatever system of formatting that works best for you so long as it remains consistent throughout the document.

Formatted, unnumbered:

Level 1 Heading: bold, flush left

Level 2 Heading: italics, flush left

Level 3 Heading: centered, bold

Level 4 Heading: centered, italics

Level 5 Heading: underlined, flush left

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• How long is an essay? Guidelines for different types of essay

How Long is an Essay? Guidelines for Different Types of Essay

Published on January 28, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

The length of an academic essay varies depending on your level and subject of study, departmental guidelines, and specific course requirements. In general, an essay is a shorter piece of writing than a research paper  or thesis .

In most cases, your assignment will include clear guidelines on the number of words or pages you are expected to write. Often this will be a range rather than an exact number (for example, 2500–3000 words, or 10–12 pages). If you’re not sure, always check with your instructor.

In this article you’ll find some general guidelines for the length of different types of essay. But keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity – focus on making a strong argument or analysis, not on hitting a specific word count.

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Table of contents

Essay length guidelines, how long is each part of an essay, using length as a guide to topic and complexity, can i go under the suggested length, can i go over the suggested length, other interesting articles.

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In an academic essay, the main body should always take up the most space. This is where you make your arguments, give your evidence, and develop your ideas.

The introduction should be proportional to the essay’s length. In an essay under 3000 words, the introduction is usually just one paragraph. In longer and more complex essays, you might need to lay out the background and introduce your argument over two or three paragraphs.

The conclusion of an essay is often a single paragraph, even in longer essays. It doesn’t have to summarize every step of your essay, but should tie together your main points in a concise, convincing way.

The suggested word count doesn’t only tell you how long your essay should be – it also helps you work out how much information and complexity you can fit into the given space. This should guide the development of your thesis statement , which identifies the main topic of your essay and sets the boundaries of your overall argument.

A short essay will need a focused, specific topic and a clear, straightforward line of argument. A longer essay should still be focused, but it might call for a broader approach to the topic or a more complex, ambitious argument.

As you make an outline of your essay , make sure you have a clear idea of how much evidence, detail and argumentation will be needed to support your thesis. If you find that you don’t have enough ideas to fill out the word count, or that you need more space to make a convincing case, then consider revising your thesis to be more general or more specific.

The length of the essay also influences how much time you will need to spend on editing and proofreading .

You should always aim to meet the minimum length given in your assignment. If you are struggling to reach the word count:

• Add more evidence and examples to each paragraph to clarify or strengthen your points.
• Make sure you have fully explained or analyzed each example, and try to develop your points in more detail.
• Address a different aspect of your topic in a new paragraph. This might involve revising your thesis statement to make a more ambitious argument.
• Don’t use filler. Adding unnecessary words or complicated sentences will make your essay weaker and your argument less clear.
• Don’t fixate on an exact number. Your marker probably won’t care about 50 or 100 words – it’s more important that your argument is convincing and adequately developed for an essay of the suggested length.

In some cases, you are allowed to exceed the upper word limit by 10% – so for an assignment of 2500–3000 words, you could write an absolute maximum of 3300 words. However, the rules depend on your course and institution, so always check with your instructor if you’re unsure.

Only exceed the word count if it’s really necessary to complete your argument. Longer essays take longer to grade, so avoid annoying your marker with extra work! If you are struggling to edit down:

• Check that every paragraph is relevant to your argument, and cut out irrelevant or out-of-place information.
• Make sure each paragraph focuses on one point and doesn’t meander.
• Cut out filler words and make sure each sentence is clear, concise, and related to the paragraph’s point.
• Don’t cut anything that is necessary to the logic of your argument. If you remove a paragraph, make sure to revise your transitions and fit all your points together.
• Don’t sacrifice the introduction or conclusion . These paragraphs are crucial to an effective essay –make sure you leave enough space to thoroughly introduce your topic and decisively wrap up your argument.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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ACT Test Day

Everything you need to know for the day of the test., what to bring on test day.

Prepare for test day by knowing what to bring and what to leave at home! 

Bring This, Not That

Admission Ticket Print a copy of your admission ticket to bring to the test center. Your ticket contains important registration match information or your online launch code.

Once you have uploaded your photo , you can print your admission ticket in MyACT .

Acceptable Photo identification  Acceptable photo identificatio n is required to be admitted to the test center. You will not be admitted to test if your ID does not meet ACT requirements.

Number 2 pencil 

Bring sharpened, No. 2 pencils with good erasers (no mechanical pencils or ink pens). Do not bring any other writing instruments; you will not be allowed to use them. 

Watch or Other Timing Device You may bring a watch, timer, or stopwatch to pace yourself during testing, but it may not have an alarm. Your watch or other timing device must be removed and placed on your desk while in the test room, so that it remains visible to staff during the test. If an alarm sounds, you’ll be dismissed and your test will not be scored.

Calculator  Bring a  permitted calculator  to be used on the mathematics test only. You are not required to use a calculator at all, but if you do, it is your responsibility to know whether your calculator is permitted.

Snacks You may bring a snack to eat outside the testing room during break.

Don't bring any of these; you can't access them:

• Textbooks, foreign language or other dictionaries, scratch paper, notes, or other aids
• Highlighter pens, colored pens or pencils, or correction fluid/tape
• Any electronic device, other than a permitted calculator and acceptable watch or timing device
• Reading material
• Tobacco in any form

Prohibited devices

The prohibited use of devices is in effect from the time you are admitted to your testing room until you are dismissed at the end of the test, including break times. Specifically: 

• You may not handle or access a cell phone or electronic device at any time in the testing room or during break times. This includes smart watches, fitness bands, and any other devices with recording, Wi-Fi, internet, or communication capabilities.
• All devices, including cell phones and wearable devices, must be turned off and placed out of sight.
• If you access your device or it activates or alarms in the testing room or during break times, you will be dismissed, your test will not be scored, and your phone or device may be taken away.

Calculator Policy

The ACT calculator policy is designed to ensure fairness for all examinees, avoid disturbances in the testing room, and protect the security of the test materials.

ACT recommends bringing a permitted calculator you are familiar with to be used on the mathematics test only. If you test online, a calculator is available in the test platform, but you may still bring a calculator to use. It is your responsibility to know whether your calculator is permitted.

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Acceptable Forms of ID

Current official photo id.

Must be an original, current (valid) ID issued by a city/state/federal government agency or your school.

ID must be in hard plastic card format. Paper or electronic formats are NOT acceptable.

You must use the name on your ID to register to test and the photo ID must be clearly recognizable as you.

ACT Student Identification Form with photo 

You MUST present this ACT Student Identification Form (PDF) with photo if you do not have a current official photo ID as described above. This document must be fully completed by a school official or notary public; neither may be a relative.

Unacceptable Forms of ID

You will not be admitted to test if you present any forms of ID other than those listed as acceptable. The following are examples of unacceptable identification:

• ACT ticket alone
• Birth certificate
• ChildFind ID card
• Credit, charge, bank or check cashing cards, even with photo
• Family portrait or graduation picture, even if the name is imprinted on the photo
• Fishing or hunting license
• ID issued by an employer
• ID letter that is not an official ACT identification form
• Learner's driving permit (if it doesn't include a photo)
• Temporary/replacement driver's license (if it doesn't include a photo)
• Organization membership card
• Passport or other photo ID so old that the person presenting it cannot be identified
• Personal recognition by anyone, including members of the test center staff, classmates, parents, counselors, and teachers
• Photo ID of parents
• Photo with your name embossed or printed on it by a photographer
• Photocopies or reproductions
• Photos issued by a business for promotional purposes (e.g., amusement parks)
• Police report of a stolen wallet or purse
• Printed, stamped, or photocopied signatures
• Published photo, including yearbook or newspaper
• Report card
• Social Security card
• Telephone calls to counselors, teachers, or school officials
• Traffic ticket, even with a physical description and signature
• Transcript, even with photo
• Web page with photo

How Long Does the ACT Take?

The ACT consists of four multiple-choice tests in English, mathematics, reading, and science. The four multiple-choice sections contain 215 questions and take 2 hours and 55 minutes to complete. After the mathematics test, You will be given a 15-minute break.

If you take the optional writing test you will have 40 minutes to complete the essay and will receive an additional 5-minute break before the writing portion begins. 

How Long is Each Section of the ACT?

Each section of the ACT varies in length and number of questions. The  sections are designed to measure skills that are most important for success in postsecondary education and that are acquired in secondary education. 

Here is a breakdown of each section of the ACT: 

Your scores will be based only on the number of questions that you answer correctly; there is no penalty for guessing. Try to answer every question within the time limit allowed for each section. Keep in mind the optional writing test will not affect your composite score. 

What to Expect on Test Day

What time does the act start.

We know test day can be stressful, so we recommend giving yourself plenty of time. Plan to arrive at the test center no later than 8:00 a.m. As you arrive, testing staff will confirm your registration against your ID, and assign you to your designated seat in a test room. You will NOT be admitted to the test if you are late .

Plan for your Test Morning

• Dress comfortably. Consider dressing in layers, so you'll be comfortable.
• If you're unsure where your test center is located, do a practice run to see how to get there and what time you'll need to leave.
• If possible, travel to the test center on a non-test day to plan your travel time.

Arriving at the Test Center

• Testing staff will check your photo ID during check-in. Be ready to begin testing after all on-time examinees are checked in.
• Please note that ACT may visit test centers to conduct enhanced test security procedures. Testing staff may use an electronic device or paper materials to administer the test. 

During the Test

• Once you break the seal on your test booklet, or use your launch code, you cannot request a Test Date Change, even if you do not complete all your tests.
• A permitted calculator may be used on the mathematics test only. It is your responsibility to know whether your calculator is permitted. Please refer to the ACT Calculator Policy (PDF).
• During your registration process, you will agree to the ACT Terms and Conditions, which contains detailed information about prohibited behavior. On test day, you will once again be asked to agree to the Terms and Conditions.

Taking a Break 

• A short break is scheduled after the second test. Using cell phones or any electronic devices during the break is prohibited . You may eat or drink outside the test room during the break.
• If you take the ACT with writing, you will have a five minute before the writing test to relax and sharpen your pencils.

Finishing Up 

• After the science test you should expect to take a shorter, multiple-choice test covering one of the previous subject areas. The results of the fifth test help develop future test questions and will not be reflected on your scores, so please try your best.
• If you do not want your test to be scored, you must tell a member of the testing staff before you leave the test center. If you do not, your test will be scored. 

What time does the ACT end?

If you take the ACT (no writing) you will finish around 12:35 p.m. If you take the ACT with writing you will typically finish at about 1:35 p.m.

Additional Reminders

• Please note that ACT may visit test centers to conduct enhanced test security procedures including, but not limited to, collecting images of examinees during check-in or other security activities on test day.
• Also remember that cheating hurts everyone. If you see it, report it .

Unexpected Changes

Missed your test date.

Once you have submitted your registration to ACT, by any method, it cannot be canceled. For more information see  Registration Changes .

Occasionally, a test center must cancel a test administration due to bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances. When this occurs, the test will be rescheduled for a future date. Visit  Rescheduled Test Centers  to find out if your test center has been rescheduled and for more information about procedures.

Unexpected Registration Changes

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Animals self-medicate with plants − behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia

Research Scholar, Classics and History and Philosophy of Science, Stanford University

Disclosure statement

Adrienne Mayor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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When a wild orangutan in Sumatra recently suffered a facial wound, apparently after fighting with another male, he did something that caught the attention of the scientists observing him.

The animal chewed the leaves of a liana vine – a plant not normally eaten by apes. Over several days, the orangutan carefully applied the juice to its wound, then covered it with a paste of chewed-up liana. The wound healed with only a faint scar. The tropical plant he selected has antibacterial and antioxidant properties and is known to alleviate pain, fever, bleeding and inflammation.

The striking story was picked up by media worldwide. In interviews and in their research paper , the scientists stated that this is “the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment by a wild animal” with a biologically active plant. The discovery will “provide new insights into the origins of human wound care.”

To me, the behavior of the orangutan sounded familiar. As a historian of ancient science who investigates what Greeks and Romans knew about plants and animals, I was reminded of similar cases reported by Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Aelian and other naturalists from antiquity. A remarkable body of accounts from ancient to medieval times describes self-medication by many different animals. The animals used plants to treat illness, repel parasites, neutralize poisons and heal wounds.

The term zoopharmacognosy – “animal medicine knowledge” – was invented in 1987. But as the Roman natural historian Pliny pointed out 2,000 years ago, many animals have made medical discoveries useful for humans. Indeed, a large number of medicinal plants used in modern drugs were first discovered by Indigenous peoples and past cultures who observed animals employing plants and emulated them.

What you can learn by watching animals

Some of the earliest written examples of animal self-medication appear in Aristotle’s “ History of Animals ” from the fourth century BCE, such as the well-known habit of dogs to eat grass when ill, probably for purging and deworming.

Aristotle also noted that after hibernation, bears seek wild garlic as their first food. It is rich in vitamin C, iron and magnesium, healthful nutrients after a long winter’s nap. The Latin name reflects this folk belief: Allium ursinum translates to “bear lily,” and the common name in many other languages refers to bears.

Pliny explained how the use of dittany , also known as wild oregano, to treat arrow wounds arose from watching wounded stags grazing on the herb. Aristotle and Dioscorides credited wild goats with the discovery. Vergil, Cicero, Plutarch, Solinus, Celsus and Galen claimed that dittany has the ability to expel an arrowhead and close the wound. Among dittany’s many known phytochemical properties are antiseptic, anti-inflammatory and coagulating effects.

According to Pliny, deer also knew an antidote for toxic plants: wild artichokes . The leaves relieve nausea and stomach cramps and protect the liver. To cure themselves of spider bites, Pliny wrote, deer ate crabs washed up on the beach, and sick goats did the same. Notably, crab shells contain chitosan , which boosts the immune system.

When elephants accidentally swallowed chameleons hidden on green foliage, they ate olive leaves, a natural antibiotic to combat salmonella harbored by lizards . Pliny said ravens eat chameleons, but then ingest bay leaves to counter the lizards’ toxicity. Antibacterial bay leaves relieve diarrhea and gastrointestinal distress. Pliny noted that blackbirds, partridges, jays and pigeons also eat bay leaves for digestive problems.

Weasels were said to roll in the evergreen plant rue to counter wounds and snakebites. Fresh rue is toxic. Its medical value is unclear, but the dried plant is included in many traditional folk medicines. Swallows collect another toxic plant, celandine , to make a poultice for their chicks’ eyes. Snakes emerging from hibernation rub their eyes on fennel. Fennel bulbs contain compounds that promote tissue repair and immunity.

According to the naturalist Aelian , who lived in the third century BCE, the Egyptians traced much of their medical knowledge to the wisdom of animals. Aelian described elephants treating spear wounds with olive flowers and oil . He also mentioned storks, partridges and turtledoves crushing oregano leaves and applying the paste to wounds.

The study of animals’ remedies continued in the Middle Ages. An example from the 12th-century English compendium of animal lore, the Aberdeen Bestiary , tells of bears coating sores with mullein . Folk medicine prescribes this flowering plant to soothe pain and heal burns and wounds, thanks to its anti-inflammatory chemicals.

Ibn al-Durayhim’s 14th-century manuscript “ The Usefulness of Animals ” reported that swallows healed nestlings’ eyes with turmeric , another anti-inflammatory. He also noted that wild goats chew and apply sphagnum moss to wounds, just as the Sumatran orangutan did with liana. Sphagnum moss dressings neutralize bacteria and combat infection.

Nature’s pharmacopoeia

Of course, these premodern observations were folk knowledge, not formal science. But the stories reveal long-term observation and imitation of diverse animal species self-doctoring with bioactive plants. Just as traditional Indigenous ethnobotany is leading to lifesaving drugs today , scientific testing of the ancient and medieval claims could lead to discoveries of new therapeutic plants.

Animal self-medication has become a rapidly growing scientific discipline. Observers report observations of animals, from birds and rats to porcupines and chimpanzees , deliberately employing an impressive repertoire of medicinal substances. One surprising observation is that finches and sparrows collect cigarette butts . The nicotine kills mites in bird nests. Some veterinarians even allow ailing dogs, horses and other domestic animals to choose their own prescriptions by sniffing various botanical compounds.

Mysteries remain . No one knows how animals sense which plants cure sickness, heal wounds, repel parasites or otherwise promote health. Are they intentionally responding to particular health crises? And how is their knowledge transmitted? What we do know is that we humans have been learning healing secrets by watching animals self-medicate for millennia.

• Zoopharmacognosy
• Animal behavior
• Self-medication
• Phytochemicals
• Ancient world

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Sofia Barnett

ChatGPT Is Making Universities Rethink Plagiarism

In late December of his sophomore year, Rutgers University student Kai Cobbs came to a conclusion he never thought possible:  Artificial intelligence might just be dumber than humans. 

After listening to his peers rave about the generative AI tool  ChatGPT , Cobbs decided to toy around with the chatbot while writing an essay on the history of capitalism. Best known for its ability to generate long-form written content in response to user input prompts, Cobbs expected the tool to produce a nuanced and thoughtful response to his specific research directions. Instead, his screen produced a generic, poorly written paper he’d never dare to claim as his own. 

“The quality of writing was appalling. The phrasing was awkward and it lacked complexity,” Cobbs says. “I just logically can’t imagine a student using writing that was generated through ChatGPT for a paper or anything when the content is just plain bad.” 

Not everyone shares Cobbs’ disdain. Ever since OpenAI launched the chatbot in November,  educators have been struggling with how to handle a new wave of student work produced with the help of artificial intelligence. While some public school systems, like New York City’s, have banned the use of ChatGPT on school devices and networks to curb cheating, universities have been reluctant to follow suit. In higher education, the introduction of generative AI has raised thorny questions about the definition of plagiarism and academic integrity on campuses where new digital research tools come into play all the time. 

Make no mistake, the birth of ChatGPT does not mark the emergence of concerns relating to the improper use of the internet in academia. When  Wikipedia launched in 2001 , universities nationwide were  scrambling to decipher their own research philosophies and understandings of honest academic work, expanding policy boundaries to match pace with technological innovation. Now, the stakes are a little more complex, as schools figure out how to treat bot-produced work rather than weird attributional logistics. The world of higher education is playing a familiar game of catch-up, adjusting their rules, expectations, and perceptions as other professions adjust, too. The only difference now is that the internet can think for itself. 

According to ChatGPT, the definition of plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work or ideas without giving proper credit to the original author. But when the work is generated by some thing rather than some one , this definition is tricky to apply. As Emily Hipchen, a board member of Brown University’s Academic Code Committee, puts it, the use of generative AI by students leads to a critical point of contention. “If [plagiarism] is stealing from a person,” she says, “then I don’t know that we have a person who is being stolen from.”

Hipchen is not alone in her speculation. Alice Dailey, chair of the Academic Integrity Program at Villanova University, is also grappling with the idea of classifying an algorithm as a person, specifically if the algorithm involves text generation.

By Matt Burgess

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Dailey believes that eventually professors and students are going to need to understand that digital tools that generate text, rather than just collect facts, are going to need to fall under the umbrella of things that can be plagiarized from. 

Although Dailey acknowledges that this technological growth incites new concerns in the world of academia, she doesn’t find it to be a realm entirely unexplored. “I think we’ve been in a version of this territory for a while already,” Dailey says. “Students who commit plagiarism often borrow material from a ‘somewhere’—a website, for example, that doesn’t have clear authorial attribution. I suspect the definition of plagiarism will expand to include things that produce.” 

Eventually, Dailey believes, a student who uses text from ChatGPT will be seen as no different than one that copies and pastes chunks of text from Wikipedia without attribution. 

Students’ views on ChatGPT are another issue entirely. There are those, like Cobbs, who can’t imagine putting their name on anything bot-generated, but there are others who see it as just another tool, like spellcheck or even a calculator. For Brown University sophomore Jacob Gelman, ChatGPT exists merely as a convenient research assistant and nothing more.

“Calling the use of ChatGPT to pull reliable sources from the internet ‘cheating’ is absurd. It’s like saying using the internet to conduct research is unethical,” Gelman says. “To me, ChatGPT is the research equivalent of [typing assistant] Grammarly. I use it out of practicality and that’s really all.” Cobbs expressed similar sentiment, comparing the AI bot to “an online encyclopedia.”

But while students like Gelman use the bot to speed up research, others take advantage of the high-capacity prompt input feature to generate completed works for submission. It might seem obvious what qualifies as cheating here, but different schools across the country offer contrasting takes.

According to Carlee Warfield, chair of Bryn Mawr College’s Student Honor Board, the school considers any use of these AI platforms as plagiarism. The tool’s popularization just calls for greater focus in evaluating the intent behind students’ violations. Warfield explains that students who turn in essays entirely produced by AI are categorically different from those who borrow from online tools without knowledge of standard citations. Because the ChatGPT phenomenon is still new, students’ confusion surrounding the ethics is understandable. And it's unclear what policies will remain in place once the dust settles—at any school.

In the midst of fundamental change in both the academic and technological spheres, universities are forced to reconsider their definitions of academic integrity to reasonably reflect the circumstances of society. The only problem is, society shows no stagnance. 

“Villanova’s current academic integrity code will be updated to include language that prohibits the use of these tools to generate text that then students represent as text they generated independently,” Dailey explained. “But I think it’s an evolving thing. And what it can do and what we will then need in order to keep an eye on will also be kind of a moving target.”

In addition to increasingly complex questions about whether ChatGPT is a research tool or a plagiarism engine, there’s also the possibility that it can be  used for learning. In other educational settings, teachers see it as a way to show students the shortcomings of AI. Some instructors are already  modifying how they teach by giving students assignments bots couldn’t complete, like those that require personal details or anecdotes. There’s also the matter of detecting AI use in students’ work, which is a  burgeoning cottage industry all its own. 

Ultimately, Dailey says, schools may need rules that reflect a range of variables.

“My guess is that there will be the development of some broad blanket policies that essentially say, unless you have permission from a professor to use AI tools, using them will be considered a violation of the academic integrity code,” Dailey says. “That then gives faculty broad latitude to use it in their teaching or in their assignments, as long as they are stipulating explicitly that they are allowing it.”

As for ChatGTP, the program agrees. “Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence are expected to drive significant innovation in the coming years,” it says, when asked how schools can combat academic dishonesty. “Schools should constantly review and update their academic honor codes as technology evolves to ensure they are addressing the current ways in which technology is being used in academic settings.”

But, a bot would say that. 

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• AI firms mustn’t govern themselves, say ex-members of OpenAI’s board

For humanity’s sake, regulation is needed to tame market forces, argue Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley

C AN PRIVATE companies pushing forward the frontier of a revolutionary new technology be expected to operate in the interests of both their shareholders and the wider world? When we were recruited to the board of OpenAI—Tasha in 2018 and Helen in 2021—we were cautiously optimistic that the company’s innovative approach to self-governance could offer a blueprint for responsible AI development. But based on our experience, we believe that self-governance cannot reliably withstand the pressure of profit incentives. With AI ’s enormous potential for both positive and negative impact, it’s not sufficient to assume that such incentives will always be aligned with the public good. For the rise of AI to benefit everyone, governments must begin building effective regulatory frameworks now.

If any company could have successfully governed itself while safely and ethically developing advanced AI systems, it would have been OpenAI . The organisation was originally established as a non-profit with a laudable mission: to ensure that AGI , or artificial general intelligence— AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—would benefit “all of humanity”. Later, a for-profit subsidiary was created to raise the necessary capital, but the non-profit stayed in charge. The stated purpose of this unusual structure was to protect the company’s ability to stick to its original mission, and the board’s mandate was to uphold that mission. It was unprecedented, but it seemed worth trying. Unfortunately it didn’t work.

Last November, in an effort to salvage this self-regulatory structure, the OpenAI board dismissed its CEO , Sam Altman. The board’s ability to uphold the company’s mission had become increasingly constrained due to long-standing patterns of behaviour exhibited by Mr Altman, which, among other things, we believe undermined the board’s oversight of key decisions and internal safety protocols. Multiple senior leaders had privately shared grave concerns with the board, saying they believed that Mr Altman cultivated “a toxic culture of lying” and engaged in “behaviour [that] can be characterised as psychological abuse”. According to OpenAI, an internal investigation found that the board had “acted within its broad discretion” to dismiss Mr Altman, but also concluded that his conduct did not “mandate removal”. OpenAI relayed few specifics justifying this conclusion, and it did not make the investigation report available to employees, the press or the public.

The question of whether such behaviour should generally “mandate removal” of a CEO is a discussion for another time. But in OpenAI’s specific case, given the board’s duty to provide independent oversight and protect the company’s public-interest mission, we stand by the board’s action to dismiss Mr Altman. We also feel that developments since he returned to the company—including his reinstatement to the board and the departure of senior safety-focused talent—bode ill for the OpenAI experiment in self-governance.

Our particular story offers the broader lesson that society must not let the roll-out of AI be controlled solely by private tech companies. Certainly, there are numerous genuine efforts in the private sector to guide the development of this technology responsibly, and we applaud those efforts. But even with the best of intentions, without external oversight, this kind of self-regulation will end up unenforceable, especially under the pressure of immense profit incentives. Governments must play an active role.

And yet, in recent months, a rising chorus of voices—from Washington lawmakers to Silicon Valley investors—has advocated minimal government regulation of AI . Often, they draw parallels with the laissez-faire approach to the internet in the 1990s and the economic growth it spurred. However, this analogy is misleading.

Inside AI companies, and throughout the larger community of researchers and engineers in the field, the high stakes—and large risks—of developing increasingly advanced AI are widely acknowledged. In Mr Altman’s own words, “Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important—and hopeful, and scary—project in human history.” The level of concern expressed by many top AI scientists about the technology they themselves are building is well documented and very different from the optimistic attitudes of the programmers and network engineers who developed the early internet.

It is also far from clear that light-touch regulation of the internet has been an unalloyed good for society. Certainly, many successful tech businesses—and their investors—have benefited enormously from the lack of constraints on commerce online. It is less obvious that societies have struck the right balance when it comes to regulating to curb misinformation and disinformation on social media, child exploitation and human trafficking, and a growing youth mental-health crisis.

Goods, infrastructure and society are improved by regulation. It’s because of regulation that cars have seat belts and airbags, that we don’t worry about contaminated milk and that buildings are constructed to be accessible to all. Judicious regulation could ensure the benefits of AI are realised responsibly and more broadly. A good place to start would be policies that give governments more visibility into how the cutting edge of AI is progressing, such as transparency requirements and incident-tracking.

Of course, there are pitfalls to regulation, and these must be managed. Poorly designed regulation can place a disproportionate burden on smaller companies, stifling competition and innovation. It is crucial that policymakers act independently of leading AI companies when developing new rules. They must be vigilant against loopholes, regulatory “moats” that shield early movers from competition, and the potential for regulatory capture. Indeed, Mr Altman’s own calls for AI regulation must be understood in the context of these pitfalls as having potentially self-serving ends. An appropriate regulatory framework will require agile adjustments, keeping pace with the world’s expanding grasp of AI ’s capabilities.

Ultimately, we believe in AI ’s potential to boost human productivity and well-being in ways never before seen. But the path to that better future is not without peril. OpenAI was founded as a bold experiment to develop increasingly capable AI while prioritising the public good over profits. Our experience is that even with every advantage, self-governance mechanisms like those employed by OpenAI will not suffice. It is, therefore, essential that the public sector be closely involved in the development of the technology. Now is the time for governmental bodies around the world to assert themselves. Only through a healthy balance of market forces and prudent regulation can we reliably ensure that AI ’s evolution truly benefits all of humanity. ■

Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley were on OpenAI’s board from 2021 to 2023 and from 2018 to 2023, respectively.

Read a response to this article by Bret Taylor, the chair of Open AI’ s board, and Larry Summers, a board member.

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By invitation june 1st 2024.

• OpenAI board members respond to a warning by former members

From the June 1st 2024 edition

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Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

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By Jonathan Swan ,  Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

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