Composing a draft

The composition stage is when you can relax, oddly enough. You know what you want to say: Now just get it down on paper （or screen）. Don't worry about style, elegance, mechanics or anything else having to do with the essay's final look. Just get it recorded. There'll be plenty of time later on for revising and polishing this rough draft. The point now is to give yourself raw material that you can shape and sharpen.

　　There's no trick in composition, as Thoreau says—unless you consider thorough preparation a trick, so that when you start writing you've already put quite a bit of work into developing and laying out a good argument.

　　A note on composing with a PC: Be fanatical about saving, backing up, and archiving your work. Save every five or ten minutes. If you're working on a public terminal, keep a copy of your paper on another medium, for instance online—you can get 300 megs of free online storage at www.freediskspace.com, among other free storage sites. Don't trust floppies to keep your files for long, and absolutely never store all your work in just one place, even your own PC. （Have you heard the urban legend about the grad student who lost his whole doctoral dissertation—seven years in the making—when his laptop was stolen from his backpack?） If you don't maintain an up-to-date archived copy, I guarantee that your hard drive, floppy, or Zip disk will explode just as you go to print out that precious paper.