You can work through the pages in this Stage at your own pace, taking a break whenever you need to. It is not a good idea to try and complete a whole Stage in one go, however, so always follow the advice to Take A Break half way through. In this stage of the AWG you will be working towards the following aims and objectives:

Aims
Objectives
Assessment

The first draft of your essay is informed by the detailed sentence outline and argument you have already prepared. If you keep to these, the first draft should be relatively quick to write.
Keep your writing style simple. If other ideas crop up while you’re writing make notes in a separate document and insert them later. You are writing for someone who is familiar with the subject and interested in what you have to say. Make your writing clear, knowledgeable, persuasive and enjoyable.
Provide your reader with signposts. If your plan is detailed, you have already decided what information is going where. Concentrate on making sure each paragraph contains an idea that elaborates a different aspect of your argument. Start each paragraph with a topic sentence that sums up what you’re going to argue. As you write, include section headings as signposts. You can take them out later, but they help keep you focussed.
The most important point to remember about this stage of the process is that it is the first draft! Try to resist revising and editing at this point. It is an unnecessary distraction and may result in you losing the structure and flow of your writing. Once you have got the first draft down on paper you will be in a better position to identify what needs to be changed, developed and improved.

Sue: So what was it like drafting an essay for the first time? James: It was unusual because like the plans I’d never really drafted before. But trying to constantly remind myself not to make it perfect; to give myself that sort of okay-that-it's-not-okay. So I'm writing and I think ‘oh that sentence is a bit clunky, but it's fine just get on with it, just keep going’ you know and it takes a lot of self-control to finish an essay and submit it thinking there was loads that I’m not happy with. But forcing yourself to think of it as a whole before you start to think of the nuances, I think was really important for me. Sue: Yes. So you don't start editing work until the whole thing is on the page. James: Yeah. Sue: Good. If you start editing too soon, and you have more experience of this now, what happens? James: I get lost. I find myself doing this sometimes now and I really have to stop myself, but I just get all muddled. Yeah, I start trying to piece things together and then you know I'm 50 words from the word count and I'm thinking I’ve got no idea where this essay has gone – there's no thread through this’! And I just, and I almost have to start again! Yeah and it's really frustrating when that happens because you think you're putting lots of effort in, but you just get yourself muddled. Sue: Yeah. So it's actually that holding back, isn't it, from the trying to polish before the ideas are fully developed? James: Yes.

First draft
Watch the interview with James, one of our former Foundation Year students, who worked through the AWG and is reflecting on the fact that he had never planned an essay in any detail before.
As you listen, notice the benefit he outlines of keeping an overview of the essay in mind at first draft stage.
Access the pdf transcript here.
James Bartoli-Edwards
Now studying BA (Hons) Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University of Sussex

You’ve looked at ways of making sure you have a clear line of argument in your essay and that your introduction and conclusion are connected. Now that you are ready to start writing the first draft of your essay you need to think about the sequence of ideas in the main body and how they fit together to create a coherent and cohesive essay. Paragraphs are the building blocks of your essay and effective paragraphing is a key skill in academic writing. Think of them as bite-sized chunks into which you break your argument to help your reader. Paragraphs can be structured in many different ways and there are no hard and fast rules about how to do this. What matters is that you convey your idea clearly to your reader. Understanding some of the features of a good paragraph can provide you with a good foundation, however.

An essay paragraph often has four main elements that can mirror the overall essay structure: the topic sentence and development of the point; supporting evidence or quotations; analysis and explanation of the evidence; and a conclusion. The idea in the topic sentence is the controlling idea, and everything else in the paragraph will relate to it, in the same way that the thesis statement is the controlling idea in the essay, and every paragraph relates to it.

Using the acronym PEEL can a useful way to prompt yourself to include these elements, which in turn can help keep your paragraphs focussed on your argument.

---

Look at the paragraph below on the left and the commentary on the right. The paragraph is from a book chapter entitled ‘Our Eugenics Past’ and examines the history of eugenics in order to contextualise contemporary debates about reproductive technologies.

Daar, J. (2017) ‘Our Eugenics Past.’ In The New Eugenics: Selective Breeding in an Era of Reproductive Technologies, pp. 28-53. NEW HAVEN; LONDON: Yale University Press. Retrieved August 22, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1kgqwrv.6

---

Should a despised and discredited movement that gained momentum a century ago and faltered after World War II play any role in the discussion of technologies invented long after historians declared the movement “a permanent stain on the national record”? (Lombardo, 2010). While advocacy abounds urging burial and non-resurrection of the shameful period in U.S. history known as the American eugenics movement (circa 1890s to 1940s), equally compelling arguments suggest that only through contemporary reflection on the factors that enabled the movement’s flourishing will we be prepared to guard against history repeating itself (Wilkinson and Gerrard, 2013). The notion of a 1900s-style eugenics revival is not presented as a concern in any literal sense; few worry that modern-day Americans would respond favorably to scientific assertions about improving the human condition by organizing a web of state- sponsored programs that assess, suppress, deprive, and encourage re-production according to one’s expressed and inherited characteristics. The goal of revisiting our eugenics past is to plumb this half-century period for the motivations, patterns, strategies, and language that drew in so many, so that we might recognize our current selves in the ghosts of our past.

Introduces the main idea in the paragraph to signal the purpose to the reader (inviting the reader to consider why we might want to revisit a painful past) Presents evidence to support her view (that it is essential that we do reflect on the past) Explains the idea in more detail (summarising the divided views on the topic) Comments on this evidence, showing how it links to the main idea (the question she posed at the start) Concludes the paragraph (by stating that reflecting will help us see that we are still capable of similar thinking. The reader will anticipate how this applies to current debates about reproductive technology) There are 3 transitional devices in the paragraph: while; equally; The notion

---

Lombardo, P. A. (2010) Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wilkinson, S. and Gerrard, E. (2013) ‘Eugenics and the Ethics of Selective Reproductions’. Staffordshire: Keele University. pp5-8. Available at: https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/65644/1/Eugenics_and_the_ethics_of_selective_reproduction_Low_Res_1.pdf (Accessed 1.8.2020)

---

A writer's voice - or argument - is evident in the way they introduce and interpret the evidence that supports their points. Paraphrased material shouldn’t dominate the paragraph. If a writer overuses their sources it may read as a string of quotes, without a ‘voice’ to tie them together or turn them into an argument. Instead, it becomes a description of what other people have said. When incorporating the ideas and/or words of others into your writing you must incorporate those ideas and words into your argument. Rather than describing, you need to interpret and give an indication of why others’ words or ideas are significant to your argument (the ‘evaluation’ part to PEEL).

Adapted from: Uni Learning (2000) University of Wollongong.

1. Reporting verbs
As you have seen a writer's academic voice, or argument, is made evident in the way they introduce and interpret the evidence that supports their points. One way you can enhance your voice is by selecting the verbs you use to introduce your sources with care. ‘Reporting’ verbs differ in terms of their strength. For example, introducing your source by saying ‘author x suggests that…' is much weaker and more tentative than if you say ‘author x argues that…' The two verbs convey a very different picture of how your chosen author sees his/her materials and research.

Open this pdf and look at the range of often-used reporting verbs that you can use to introduce your sources in your own essay.
Think about your sources you have chosen for your own essay. How will you introduce them?




2. Cautious or mitigating language (hedging)
A second way to enhance your voice in your academic writing is to use hedging. Hedging is a type of language use which 'protects' your claims. Using language with a suitable amount of caution can protect your claims from being easily dismissed. It also helps to indicate the level of certainty you have in relation to your supporting evidence.


Open this link and read the Text Comparison section.

Drafting and editing are two different activities, and it is helpful to keep them separate. For your AD assessed essay you will write at least one draft, and then revise and edit it. Academic writers often produce very many drafts, revising and editing each one as they proceed.

Drafting Stage 1

When you write your first draft, finding a way to get your ideas onto paper in an order that is logical to both you and your reader can be quite difficult, so it’s important not to make the process more difficult by worrying about finding the right word or worrying about the small details. It can be better to leave a gap, which you can fill in later, instead of getting stuck. Be sure to remind yourself to go back and fill in the gap later, perhaps by putting a note in square brackets [find the word] or highlighting the section.

Sue: You wrote your first draft, Chloé, working/sort of building on the work that you'd done with your annotated bibliography and your mind map; submitted it and got tutor feedback on that draft, and from there went on to write your final essay. Talk to me a bit about the process of drafting, feedback, and then revising. Chloé: Drafting the essay was really hard because it was a 2000-word essay so it seemed like a lot. And when I saw my annotated bibliography, my mind map, I just thought I would never get to the 2000 words. I did, then I went over it, so I had to rework it, and in the end I thought ‘it's just a draft so they would not mind having a bit more words’. So that's why the feedback was really helpful because they told me where I could potentially delete some of the sentences, get rid of them and not work on it because it's not really important, and then start focussing on my thesis statement. Sue: So when you completed your draft did you feel that that was a final product in a sense? Chloé: I felt like it was, but it also felt like it was missing a lot of things, that I didn't talk about everything because I already went over the limit of the words so I just thought I would stop there. The fact that I got all the feedback helped me to delete some of the parts and just focus on my main argument and develop it and work more on it, so my final draft felt much better, better to read, easier to read than my first draft. Sue: So about readability. About taking your reader into account and about helping your reader follow that argument all the way through. Is that the kind of feedback you got? Chloé: I got this feedback, and I also got about my thesis statement – because it wasn't really clear where I was going, so I needed to make that clear. And when I read over it on my draft and on my final essay I could see the differences; how the stage 3 essay was a bit messy because you kept telling us ‘it's just a draft, don't stress too much about it’ and the fact that you told me ‘you need to make your thesis statement clear’ and you would give me ideas of how to do it, or help/where I could get help. I immediately tried to do all of that and at the end when I came up with a thesis statement it helped me to develop my essay and actually delete a lot of things and develop more on some of the arguments. Sue: So actually even though you'd already gone through quite a long stage of the preparation process that thesis statement still benefited from being tightened up a little bit more. Chloé: Definitely.

First draft and feedback
Watch the interview with Chloé, one of our former Foundation Year students, who worked through the AWG and is reflecting on the way the feedback she received on her draft helped her improve it.
Access the pdf transcript here.
Chloé Vanrapenbusch
Now studying BA English Language and Linguistics at University of Sussex


Drafting Stage 2
























Turnitin is the name of the software used at the University of Sussex for providing marks and feedback and checking for originality on text-based assessments. In Stage 2, Part 2 of the AWG you looked at the Turnitin Draft Check site in Canvas and submitted your Stage 2 assessment to the site to see what useful information the Similarity Report might give you.


You can find out more about submitting work to Turnitin and Canvas on the Student Hub.












Here is a reminder of all of the assessed tasks that you should already have completed in this stage:




Notes on Submissions
You are responsible for submitting your work on time and will receive a penalty if you do not. Work submitted more than 7 days late will not be marked. This will have an impact on the final mark for your assessed portfolio. Please note that you are required to submit to the published submission point, and we cannot accept submissions by email or by hand.