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100 OTHER IMPORTANT FACTORS IN WRITING

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2.    Why Teenagers Take Drugs

There are several reasons why teenagers take drugs. First of all, it is easy for young people to get drugs. Drugs are available almost anywhere, from a school cafeteria to a movie linę to a football gamę. Teens don’t have to risk traveling to the slums or dealing with shady types on Street corners. It is also easy to get drugs because today's teens have spending money, which comes from allowances or earnings from part-time jobs. Teens can use their money to huy the luxuries they want--records, makeup, clothes, or drugs. Second. teens take drugs because the adolescent years are filled with psychological problems. For a teenager. one of these problems is facing the pressure of making important life decisions, such as choosing a career path. Another problem is establishing a sense of self. The teen years are the time when young people must become morę independent from their parents and form their own values. The enormous mental pressures of these years can make some people tum to drugs. A finał, and perhaps most important, reason why teenagers take drugs is peer pressure to conform. Teens often become very close to special friends, for one thing, and they will share a friend’s interests, even if one of them is drugs. Teenagers also attend parties and other social events where it's all-important to be one of the crowd, to be "cool." Even the most maturę teenager might be tempted to use drugs rather than risk being an outcast. For all these reasons, drugs are a major problem facing teenagers.

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Revising and Proofreading

Writing an effective paper is almost never done all at once. Rather, it is a step-by-step process in which you take your paper through a series of stages—from prewriting to finał draft.

In the first stage, you get your initial ideas and impressions about the subject down on paper; you accumulate raw materiał. You do this through brainstorming, freewriting, and making lists and scratch outlines.

In the second stage, you shape, add to, and perhaps subtract from your raw materiał as you take your paper through a series of two or three or four rough drafts. You work to make elear the single point of your paper, to develop fully the specific evidence needed to support that point, and to organize and connect the specific evidence. For example, perhaps in the second draft you will concentrate on adding details that will further support the main idea of your paper. At the same time you also may eliminate details that, you realize, do not truły back up your main point. And perhaps in the next draft, you will work on reorganizing the details and adding connections between sentences so that your materiał will hołd together.

In the last stage, you proofread, or edit, the next-to-final draft. Proofreading is an essential step that some people avoid, often because they have worked so hard on the previous stages. It may be better to set your paper aside for a while and then proofread with a fresh, rested mind. Proofreading for sentence-skills mistakes can turn an average paper into a better one and a good paper into an excellent one. A later section of this book will give you practice in proofreading, in the form of a series of editing tests (pages 486-496).

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE REVISING AND PROOFREADING PROCESS

This section will show you the stages that can be involved in writing an effective paper. You will śee what one student, Gene, did in preparing a paper on his worst job.