Stage 3: Develop Your Draft

The third stage in the academic writing process is about developing your draft from the ideas that you have identified in your brainstorming. The first thing to emphasise here is that developing a draft of an academic assignment is not just about writing. For an academic essay (or other types of assignments), the development of a draft means that you are doing activities such as thinking, selecting of relevant sources, reading and notetaking. There are lots of mini processes that go into developing the draft and we are going to look at them in this chapter so that you are clear about what you are trying to achieve at this stage of the writing process.