 My name is Demra Hayes, and I'm from the Air Force Research Institute at Air University. Welcome to our video series, Academic Writing for Airmen. In today's video, I want to talk about setting up a timeline for completing a writing task. In a previous video, I talked about the six stages of the writing process, analyzing the writing task, planning for writing, writing your rough drafts, revising your drafts, editing your drafts, and finally publishing. So today we're still in that first stage analyzing your writing task, all the things that you do before you actually start writing. Now most academic writing tasks cannot be completed quickly. They require lots of research and lots of hard work and thought to develop a coherent argument and lots of revising to make sure you get your message right. In other words, good academic writing can't be put off until the last minute. So in this video, I want to talk about creating a timeline for completing your writing tasks. So let's take an example, let's take as an example a research paper that is assigned maybe near the beginning of the semester and due at the end. So maybe you have roughly three months to complete the assignment of maybe a 25 page scholarly essay. So three months sounds like a long time until you already start thinking about everything you have to do. Select a broad topic, refine or narrow that topic, develop research questions and do preliminary research to understand your topic, refine your topic further, formulate a thesis that makes an argument, define your purpose and your audience, develop a broad outline and maybe get a mentor's feedback on that thesis and broad outline, and then do lots of research to flesh out the outline and to support your main argument or your thesis. Decide how best to order your ideas and your evidence. Write a first draft, write a good introduction, write a good conclusion. Revise the first draft to clarify your ideas and support your thesis. And then do more research to fill in the holes in your argument. Prepare a second draft. Add illustrations and tables if needed to present your evidence. Make sure all your paragraphs are well developed but not repetitive. Have someone read your draft and give you feedback. Make sure your research is integrated smoothly into your own writing and make sure the draft actually supports the thesis. Write good transitions between ideas. Prepare properly formatted end notes and bibliography entries. Edit your essay to eliminate wordiness and redundancies. Clarify confusing sentences. Eliminate grammatical and punctuation errors and many other things too. So wow, that three months is seemingly awfully short when you look at it that way, so it's really important with a writing assignment like this to set some interim deadlines for yourself. Some dates by which you will have completed certain parts of the writing process. At a minimum, I recommend that you set deadlines for these milestones. A deadline by which you will have selected a topic about which to do your research. A deadline for developing some initial research questions. A deadline for finalizing the thesis. Often what happens when you're writing an essay, you'll start out with an idea for a thesis, but as you do a little bit of research you'll refine or reformulate that thesis. So set a deadline for having a final thesis. And then a deadline for a formal outline that shows all the major parts of your argument. It's always a good idea to have someone else review that. And a deadline for having enough research done to start writing the first draft. Now as you write you may discover things that you need to go back and do further research on, but set a date by which you're going to have enough research done so that you can actually sit down and start cranking out that first draft. Then a deadline for completing the first draft. And a deadline for completing a final draft with nothing left to do except edit it for grammar and style. Now conducting the research and the writing and the revising multiple drafts will take the largest portion of your time, but don't short change the editing or the cleanup process. So get out a calendar, work back from your due date and set some deadlines along the way. And one important thing, make sure you build in enough time to your schedule to let your drafts rest as you revise and you edit. Now ideally you should put a draft aside maybe for a weekend before you start revising it. When you come back to refresh you'll really, you'll do a much better job with it. You need some distance from the draft to be able to revision or reseal it, which is what you do when you revise. And the same thing when you're ready to edit for grammar. Put the essay aside for an evening or even for a weekend and then edit it. Then put aside it again for another night and come back and pre-freed it again. You'll find many more errors and correct many more problems if you're fresh when you look at the essay. So bottom line is don't wait until the last minute to start the writing process. Complete a timetable for yourself and really try to stick to it. And then allow time to put your writing aside for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes. As always we would love to hear how these videos are helping you or if you have suggestions for improvements or for additional topics you'd like for us to cover, use the email address on the screen to get in touch with us. Thanks and we'll see you next time.