a formal outline. In writing your first list, don’t bother to set items down in the order of importance. List your main points and trust your mind to organize them. You will probably make one list, study it, make another, study it, and perhaps make another. You can orga- nize each list more completely than the last. This preliminary process may save you hours of starting and stopping.
Write with your list outline in front of you. Once you begin to write, commit yourself to the task at hand. Do not get up until you have writ- ten for an hour. Write your thoughts quickly. Let one sentence give you an idea to develop in the next. Organization, grammar, spelling, and even clarity of sentences are not nearly as important as getting the first draft together. No matter how desperate you feel, keep going.
Always keep your mind open to new ideas that pop into your head as you write. Let your list outline help you, but don’t become a slave to it. Writers often start an essay with one topic in mind only to discover that another pushes the first one aside as they work. Ideas you had not even thought of before you began to write may pile onto your paper, and five or six pages into your first draft you may realize that you are going to write about something you did not imagine when you started.
If such a revelation comes, be grateful and accept it. But don’t imme- diately tear up or erase your draft and start all over again. Make yourself keep on writing, developing these new ideas as they come. If you sud- denly start all over again, you may break the train of thought that has given you the new topic. Let your thoughts follow your new thesis, sail- ing on that tack until the wind changes.
When you have said everything you can say in this draft, print it out if you are working on a computer. Get up from your desk and go sit in a chair somewhere else to read it