Successful Prewriting

For me, in the past, I have had to do much prewriting before opening a Word Document to write the actual essay. First, I have generate many ideas about what to write; anything that pops into my head I will write down. From those general ideas I form a loose outline. I will start by writing down the ideas I want to be in each paragraph of the body of the paper (I do not do anything for the introduction and the conclusion until the body of the paper is complete). Then I will write a more fleshed out outline. In a couple classes my professors wanted the students to turn in an outline with complete sentences instead of a rough draft. I have learned to love this style of prewriting because once it is done, the paper is most of the way written. Instead of fragments, which are sometimes are for me to string together to form a well written essay, I have already written full sentences waiting to be copied into my essay. From there, I will write the body of my paragraph followed by my introduction then conclusion.