Got me thinking… I’ve rarely written more than one draft in the sense of writing everything out and making drastic rewrites and corrections later on. I do, however, change a lot while I’m in the process of writing. I may change a word, or move a paragraph, or decide a line of argument isn’t working a delete it entirely. Because I do all of my writing on a word processor, it’s pretty easy to do this. Sometimes I do save it and close it and “let it percolate” for a while before making a few more changes, but not always.
I was always frustrated with teachers who required a rough draft and a significantly altered final draft. I felt if my first draft met the requirements of the final paper, that was a total waste of my time. Yet I understand they were teaching writing as a process, not the major imports of Sunnydale and their effects on local wood carving industry (or whatever the topic was) so I jumped through their hoops, grudgingly.
Once upon a time, it was absolutely required to write several drafts of papers, because you couldn’t correct or refine it well as you went along. Has that changed, do you think? Should we be teaching students to alter and correct as they go along, now that we have the technology to do that? Or is there still value in teaching and using the Rough Draft, Second Draft, Third Draft, Final Draft structure of writing?
This is an interesting question I’ve had to ponder a lot in my line of work. Yes,
Most accomplished writers write recursively–that is, they write something, they go over it, and change it.
However, the pedagogy of teaching with drafts accommodates something else: writing is discursive, not a solitary process. Even if no one else reads your writing from beginning until the final product, good writing by necessity is shaped by an acute sense of audience (as opposed to reader). By turning in (and making changes according to response to) a draft, you are forced to define that audience for yourself before you finish it. For developing writers, sometimes it’s necessary to have them do a draft (and make changes according to the response) just for the sake of it, to underscore the role audience plays in shaping writing–no matter how good the first draft is. It’s also just a good habit to have when one’s work involves writing: it makes clear to beginning writers that writing is especially a social process in that kind of environment.
So I wouldn’t confuse the two things: 1), the ease of immediate self-correction that word-processors allow; and the 2), the necessarily social dimension of writing, which is often ignored by beginning writers, and which becomes clear in the drafting process.
From everything I’ve heard, different writers have different ways of approaching writing, and this has been true since long before word processors. Personally, I have to figure out what I’m going to say, and in what order, before I can write anything, but once I do that and actually write it, I usually only need to make minor changes. But some writers still prefer writing a first draft longhand, or typing out a first draft as fast as possible without thinking about it first, to see what happens, and then doing a rewrite.
Writing a paper that you think is good is easy. Writing a paper that other people think is good is much harder, and requires at least one other reader. So yes, preliminary versions are still a necessary part of the writing process, and they will be for a long time.
Interesting. Would you be willing to say a bit more about the difference between audience and reader?
Absolutely, and this is probably a good reason to still teach writing with drafts, so students who will write better with that method will discover that they write better with that method.
Well, sure. But if I’m writing a “rough draft” which would earn me an A as the final paper, then I’d argue that I (and some other writers) have an innate or developed sense of how to write a paper that other people think is good.
Maybe my real beef is with mandatory writing classes for people who already know how to write.
I really respect you as a poster but this statement reflects poorly on you. The craft of writing is one which is refined over a lifetime. I work with a number of people who write for a living and do it well, and they eagerly attend writing workshops to develop their skill. They also continuously and actively seek input and evaluation of their work.
People who think they have nothing to learn about writing, know less about writing than they think they do.
True, and my comment was flip. But again, I was talking about mandatory (read: basic level) classes, and rough drafts that would earn an A as a final paper, not writing in all arenas.
I mean, I used to write my paper and save it, then open it again and change a bunch of stuff for the worse and save **that **as the “rough draft”. The actual first paper I turned in as the final paper, and the teachers found it totally acceptable and A-worthy. So, at that level, yeah, I was done. I had, in syllabus terms, met the objectives of the class and mastered the content. That doesn’t mean there aren’t further levels of writing I can strive to reach (and do), but it does seem to indicate that I didn’t need that particular class structure.
Keep in mind that what might earn an A one place might get a C elsewhere. And trying to get something published is a completely different matter. I haven’t seen a single chemistry paper that didn’t undergo at least 12 or so drafts, and that’s before peer review. I would say that today’s technology makes more drafts even easier.
I’ve never been published in an academic journal. But I’ve had short-fiction published, and with the exception of very small, one or two sentence toss-offs, each piece has taken anywhere between 4-6 drafts to get right, and the final draft has always been dramatically different from the first draft. Not to mention all the pre-writing character development, sketching, and note-taking that happens before I start the actual story. And from conversations with other fiction writers, my approach doesn’t seem all that uncommon.
Attending college, I’ve never done more than one draft for any of the papers I’ve written. And when the instructors require that students turn in a rough draft, I take the Whynot approach, which is to go back and fuck some shit up so that it looks like an actual rough draft. But, I mean, when you’re writing for professors, you’re also writing as a college student – and college students are like the stupidest fucking people on the planet sometimes. Professors aren’t expecting anything outstanding from you.
I’m like Thudlow Boink: not only do I usually, by the time I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), produce something which will only need minor corrections, but I used to have a horrible time convincing my teachers that no, reviewing my exam essays time and again and tweaking would not produce a better essay: “I know what I know, what I do not know is not going to suddenly appear into my brain no matter how many times I re-read what I’ve written! I’ve already written what I do know, and any time I change anything the new version turns up to be worse!”
Other people need to prepare the index before they can even start writing: I’ll fit my writing to a required list of sections if there is one, but my drafting takes place in my head. Both methods are perfectly valid, and both will continue in use for as long as we have human beings writing: diversity, yay!
I guess I don’t see why I couldn’t turn in the first draft as the first draft, and then see if I couldn’t improve on it for the final product. Why not exceed the expectations of the class and see if I can’t get better constructive comments from the prof, ones that will actually apply and be helpful?
Anyhow, yes, I believe in drafts and rewriting. Though I do it on a word processor. I make my kids do them by hand, since they can’t type yet (their papers are short. In fact I’m still taking dictation from the younger one; she only writes out the final draft). For them, one of my goals is for them to realize right from the start that they can always improve their writing–and that editing and constructive criticism is an important part of the process that supposed to be helpful, not a comment on their worth as human beings. We emphasize a lot that real writers do drafts and editing.
I don’t write rough drafts unless it’s required for a grade. I also tend not to do things in chunks: I get my thoughts generally organized and then I dump out the paper all in one go, tweaking it as I write. I get “into a zone,” so to speak, and if I stop writing and come back later the whole thing feels disjointed. Most of my major papers in college were written in 6-hour marathon sessions (no, not the night before; I don’t do the procrastination thing). The grades I’ve gotten back have shown no major problems with this approach, so I haven’t changed it. I suspect it would be a lot different if I ever tried to do non-academic writing.
The same applies to exams: I answer all the questions, do a quick check just to make sure I didn’t miss any and followed all the directions, then turn it in. None of these hour-long rereads agonizing over answers that my classmates like to do. In general, I’ve found that staying too long on one question results more often in overthinking and changing a right answer to a wrong one than the reverse. The only tests I’ve ever really checked over with a fine-toothed comb are math tests. I just want to get the damned thing off my desk and go do something else, and sitting there staring at my answers is not going to make me know it any better.
The thing is, who cares if I can improve my writing? If I do not want to become a writer, my writing accomplishes what I’ve set out to accomplish, and it is good enough to get me an A, why stress over improvements? I’m not writing a book, and it’s not as if my English classes are trying to teach me to write a book. I’m not interested in my paper being published. The only audience for my paper is my professor, and he’s already laid out the exact requirements to get the grade I want.
In college, I just wrote my papers the night before, and always got an A. It was quite annoying in high school when the teachers would often require a rough draft. Assuming it was worth enough points to matter, I always turned in what was essentially a finished paper, often with intentional mistakes that I could fix later. If I were actually required to have a significantly different rough draft, I can only imagine I’d turn in a brainstorming session–something I normally don’t bother writing down, and usually has nothing to do with the final paper.
I probably do more editing of my posts here than I ever did for my papers in school. But, even then, a formalized draft process would leave me well behind. I need to be free to make edits at any point in the process, instead of being forced to continue with bad writing. For example, the above paragraph was finalized well before I even started this one. But that sort of editing was unacceptable for drafts.
As for sharing work with others, I never had a good experience with that. The few times it was required, I wound up doing a ton of work to help the other person, but I got nearly nothing from others. And it’s not as if I was the best writer in the class. It was just that the better writers rarely had anything to really say to me (and I them). I much more enjoyed working with those whose work was barely functional and bringing it up to snuff.
No, I think the draft system is just too formal and rigid to be useful for a large number of people. I mentioned above that I always got As in college. That was because the draft system was finally optional.
I write a draft, print it out, read it carefully, make comments (and, in my case, get comments from my coauthors) revise it. Do it again until no more comments.
Once a coauthor and I were in the final process of preparing camera-ready copy of a book. But in the 450 page book were 8 paragraphs that Latex could not find suitable breakpoints or hyphenations and had stuck something into the margins. I could have fixed them by allowing looser lines, but I figured why not try. All the sticking out lines were the first or second lines of a paragraph since that is where there is the least room for extra space. So I did it. I reworded the offending eight sentences. I sent the results to my coauthor to vet. He replied that not only did he approve, but he felt all eight replacements were in one way or another clearer or better written than the originals. He added that we would have a better book if we subjected every single sentence to the same close scrutiny. We didn’t, but I had the thought that this is what fine writers do and at least part of the reason their writing is fine.
Incidentally, Isaac Asimov once wrote that he could see no reason to start using a word processor since he typed 200 words a minute and never revised. And, although I enjoyed his books and columns, his writing showed the lack of editing.
Word has the “reviewing toolbar”. We use it a lot in online writing classes. Allows the teacher and other students to place comments, highlight, and offer changes to the paper.
That copy of the file becomes the rough draft.
Doesn’t Word have a versions feature? where it saves version 1,2,3? I can’t recall. May have been Word Perfect that did that. You can always do it manually with resave.
The reader is the person who actually reads a text. The audience is a guiding awareness an author builds into a text, in order to achieve rhetorical ends. In academic writing, for example, you assert propositions along with certain references to previously published assertions. You wouldn’t necessarily do this, however, in a popular magazine article. You also demonstrate your audience in academic writing by your register (word choice, formality, etc.), and refraining from directly addressing the reader.
Here on this message board, posters demonstrate the audience by providing links when making assertions in GQ, etc.
If you look at a billboard in Korean, and you don’t know Korean, but you can figure out what it’s advertising and get an idea of what it’s appealing to, you’re the reader, but you’re obviously not the audience.
I’m currently writing my own fiction piece for personal enjoyment. I’m pantsing the hell off it (I’ve got a general story structure in mind, but I’m largely improvising as I go), but I haven’t even gotten it to where I want to show it to another reader yet, and I’m finding that the revision process is…continuous. Every time I sit down to write, I read over what I’ve already written, and it’s a rare occasion that I don’t make some tweak or other. Without a word processor, I would have pages and pages of writing marked up with corrective notes, additions, deletions, etc. which would all go into the final copy when I’m satisfied with everything. And even then, once I am satisfied, I’m sure my preliminary reader will have comments and suggestions that will lead to more changes. I’m confident of my spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure, but content is a much trickier beast.
So on the one hand, I’m with the people grumbling about being forced to do drafts in school. I was the same way: sit down, bang out a paper, hand it in, get an A, and I considered the rough draft a wholly unnecessary step. But now that I’m writing something I want others to approve of and enjoy, I’m finding the drafting process to be invaluable. The details aren’t quite the same as what I was taught in school, but the concept certainly is.
Interestingly, many people feel that computers have harmed the quality of college writing. Now students see the printed first draft as ‘final’, and are very reluctant to make changes. In the past, a handwritten draft wouldn’t have the same authority.
I make my students do multiple drafts. I know it annoys some of them. But frankly, their work is not as good as they think it is. It’s very easy to get an ‘A’ in my courses (grade inflation), but that doesn’t mean the student work is anything like as good as it could be.
Ok, I think I get it. But I’m one of those students who has to rephrase things to be sure:
So the “audience” is the type of person or group of people I think I’m writing to, and that will influence my word choice, sentence structure, and even topic selection. The audience may or may not ever read the piece when it’s finished. If, for example, I’m writing for publication and it’s not picked, the audience won’t ever become the reader. The reader is the actual human being who actually reads it - be it an editor or a consumer or a student or you on this message board. The reader may be part of the audience, but they may not be. If, for example, a 10 year old reads this post, she will be the reader, but not the audience I was writing to.
Is that close?
ETA: this was in response to guizot, of course. You speedy typists got in when I thought the thread was dead!
What rule says the final product must be different than the draft? If you write that well, write the draft, turn it in as a draft. Turn the same thing in as a final. If the teacher has recommended changes to the draft, you are foolish for not making the modifications. You should know your grade is based on your ability to please the teacher, not the quality of your work. If the teacher can point out valid changes that could have been made to the final, then you aren’t that good at writing after all.
