These stages are useful for the informal type of essay but can be useful for many other types of writing.

          1   Choosing the topic

Choose a topic for which you have background, one that you know something about.
Choose a topic that you like.
Choose a topic for which you find abundant bibliography at the library.
Choose a topic that will be of interest to your readers.
Choose a topic that is a hot issue or that can become one.

2. Narrow down the topic. Make it manageable. Can it be written in the time you have? Sometimes, narrowing the topic can be done without doing any previous reading but the opposite seems to be better.

3. Try to make an outline. Making an outline helps you include all the important points and not to overlook the other less important ones. The initial step is to brainstorm for ideas about the topic. This will generate a large amount of candidate ideas to develop. Choose the most important and relevant ones and organize them.

         4. Choose the rhetorical technique that you think is most suitable to develop your
          ideas.Don´t  forget to do as much reading about your topic as you can. This will help you
          to get more ideas, grammar, vocabulary and will help you get the feel for the particular style
          Think about your audience, the people who are going to read your paper. Your audience is
          going to determine the register (lexicon, grammar, style) of your paper.

          5.Write the first draft. Remember that writing is a revision process. Nothing gets perfect
          the first time. Writers usually write many times their works before they are satisfied.
          When you write your first draft, concentrate on putting down your ideas. Do not let
          spelling, punctuation or style let you stop the flow of ideas. At this stage, your ideas
          are more important than form

          6.Before handing in your paper, make a thorough revision process. The most common
          mistake is to hand in your first computer printout without even having looked it up. It
          will be plagued with errors of all kinds.
 
 

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