Good lord yes. You can’t see something if you don’t know what you’re looking for in the first place. It’s why I always disliked when the teacher had the other students give feedback; why assume they’re going to be any better at it than me when they’re in the same freaking class? A different set of eyes by itself can only go so far.
Well, peer-feedback has some use, but it’s limited. If one student is just being lazy, or submitting incomplete work–just not trying–then the others can call him/her on it.
I think we need to distuiguish between essay writing, or technical, that is, presenting arguments, and fiction writing, what people do at home.
When I learned dialetic essays, we had to do a rough draft to get our arguments organized on paper, and then the final was the proper formulation on paper. Now, this was hand-written for 9th grade test in class, so obviously different from doing a 10-page essay for a college class. Still, I think both in essay and in fiction writing, having a rough draft / outline to organize things at the start is useful to most people, esp. beginners at writing.
Taking into account that what works for most people doesn’t work for all people, and that “draft” can mean different things to different people - here, I mean a draft as something very short compared to the final product.
And if you’re writing a 3-month-paper, then checking in every week with your teacher, showing the progress of your materials collection, your outline, your rough draft, can help you keep the timetable and prevent you from going off-course, missing something, getting sidetracked.
Also, esp. with fiction, I think that writing a few pages, and then letting them sit overnight and proofreading again gives a different view than editing while you’re in the process of typing. So in that sense, a draft is also useful.
There’s a rant somewhere on the net about how terrible Word and similar programs are because people try to layout while writing, when it’s so much better to first concentrate on writing and doing the layout and structure etc. in a seperate step. While this is not the fault of Word, there is, I think, a grain of truth there, that it’s better to concentrate on one task or one aspect at a time, instead of trying to do everything at once.
I’s say the concept of what a draft is has been redefined because of computers and word processors. Other people can read your work and comment on it before it is ever printed out. You can make major changes in the structure and order of it almost without noticing because the labor is so much less than it used to be. You insert text tentatively and either leave it in or pull it out.
Whether a schoolteacher allows a student writer to take advantage of all these options is a separate question.
WhyNot, I am with you 100% on my experience in college writing courses. I pretty consistently was able to get As on most papers without the process of a “draft.”
However, I’ve never done a second draft of a paper that was worse than the first, nor have I ever approached a paper to revise it and said, “nope, nothing to make better here.”
So, I think that drafts are useful for people of all abilities, and are definitely not “outdated” by today’s technology.
I do think that the idea of just plowing through the entire paper and producing a “rough draft” is a little obsolete today, when one can be a quarter of the way through an essay, write a paragraph, then make 5 changes to the paragraph before moving on. I think that does constitute making a draft and revising, though it doesn’t produce a “rough draft” deliverable like the old days. I think it’s quite possible to be revising so much during writing that you barely need to make changes once the entire essay is written. In the bad old days, you couldn’t easily go back and make changes to a sentence you just wrote, so turning in multiple drafts to an instructor made more sense.
Yes, exactly. And that’s how I write, and why I don’t have a “rough draft” to turn in. It’s not that I never change anything - I do, I go back and correct, reword, move stuff around, etc., all the time. I just do it as I’m writing. I’ve probably changed 40% of this post by character count while I’m replying. I’ve made a few typos, I changed that % estimate twice, and I added “Yes, exactly.” at the beginning because it sounded wrong to start a post with “And.” (I just played around with where to put that period after And, too.) But if you asked me to turn in a rough draft of this post, I wouldn’t know what to give you. There wasn’t a discrete draft which I then revised, there’s been a constant stream of small changes which all culminated in this post.
That’s what I mean by asking if the technology has changed the way we should or do teach writing. 40 years ago, I couldn’t have tweaked my writing as I go along. Now I can, and do. So should we teach kids that you can edit as you go, or is there some value to them as learners, or for their teachers as teachers, to seeing the errors and initial ideas in a concrete draft form?
As mentioned up thread, it’s very useful to look at your writing after a period of time. The stopping point can be called a “rough draft”, but it can be any arbitrarily chosen point in the process.
It’s also most useful to return to your writing with feedback from someone else, either in the form of a conference or written feedback. Without the drafting process, it’s hard to provide this.
Lastly, some students really need to be forcibly taught that it’s ok to push through when they hit a stall: some kids are almost OCD in the way they want to polish every sentence as they write. Not only is this time consuming, it leads to lousy essays: they never have the flexibility to go back and adjust the paper as they write and discover new directions/ideas/implications because as they finish each sentence it becomes a Law of Nature and cannot be changed.
Now, none of these goals are accomplished if a teacher just says “hey, turn in your paper with a rough draft stapled to the back”. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worthwhile goals when approached properly.
Your questions in your second post are compelling and your overall thesis is stronger than the one posited in the OP. You’ve obviously taken to heart some of the suggestions made by your peers and encorporated it into your work. Great job, keep up the good work!
Cute. Annoying, but cute. 
The second post was not a *revision *of the first post. It was an entirely different topic.
Now, you might be on to something if you suggest that my most recent post before this one was a revision of the first post, in that I made many of the same points with different words after **robert_columbia’**s post validated that my method is not unique to me. I still wouldn’t call it a revision or a second draft though, since I didn’t even consult the OP when writing Post 47. I just said a lot of the same things at a new point in the conversation.
Yes, but surely your “final draft” that you’ve polished as you go can still be improved more?
Just turn in your “final draft” as the rough draft, and then go back over the whole paper the next day and see what improvements you can make, make them, and turn in the second draft as the final draft. If you honestly think you have to put intentional errors into the rough draft, you’re doing it wrong. Or rather, you’re being lazy, because I guarantee you could improve your final draft if you tried.
If you don’t care, or only want to do enough work to get an A in the class and move on, then fine. But surely being unable to improve your “final draft” isn’t an indication of your strength as a writer, but your weakness.
This is truth.
You guys are reminding me of Dalí saying “I can never paint as well as Velázquez did, so I don’t try to.” If Dalí had never shown a picture because it wasn’t a Velázquez, some of my favourite paintings and installations would never have existed. There is such a thing as good enough - and a draft is useless if all your instructions for improvement are “write better”.
I don’t dispute that necessarily. I look at as much of what I’ve written of my WIP story as I can each night before writing more, and as thoughts strike me I tweak and improve on sections I’m happy with, much less ones that rubbed me the wrong way when I wrote them.
But in the context of a student still in the process of learning, sometimes you don’t know what there is to improve. If I as a student look at my paper and can’t figure out what there is to improve without external input, I don’t disagree that indicates I’m a weak writer, but how exactly is that my fault?
I think there is a long-term benefit in continuing to use the concept of drafts. I’ve been out of school a long time, but my job requires a lot of writing. Everything from correspondence to reports to directives and policies. I do a lot of editing as I write, but for anything other than routine correspondence (and message board posts), I save a draft and return to it a day or two later.
I must consider not only the audience, but the purpose of what I am writing. It’s too easy to write the report or policy in a way that assumes a certain level of background knowledge and not realize until I re-read it that my audience most likely won’t have that knowledge or to use a a format that is appropriate for answering an email but inappropriate for a policy. Aside from that issue, most of the policies and directives I write really are drafts (and will say so in a large font at the top of the page ) because they will not take effect until approved by someone higher up the food chain.
I suspect that most of my subordinates were not taught to write using a draft process of any sort. Not so much because of the errors , but because of their reaction when reports are returned to them for revision. They’re almost insulted, and seem to think that their assignment was to write and submit the report and it is then my job to approve whatever they wrote. I can’t help but think they spent their high school and college years writing papers ,submitting them and taking whatever grade they received.
Wait just a durned minute here. Surely you people are getting ahead of yourselves. You must write an outline first. You cannot proceed to the first rough draft without an outline. That would simply not do.
Begone, Luddite!
That is why the writer is a student. A good teacher, or editor, should make the reason for recommended changes clear enough so that the next time the student writes something, he or she will see the problems themselves.
If professional writers, who have had more practice than others, could do first drafts right, there would be no such thing as editors. I’ve written and published some godawful number of technical papers, and have a column. Once in a while the muse strikes, and I can do a 550 word column which gets almost no comments from my professional editor. Most of the time the comments are about things I assume of the audience which I shouldn’t. I’ve been doing the column for over 15 years, so I know how to write it better than most. I edit columns submitted by others, and usually find plenty of changes to make. The column has to be about 550 words - chopping down a 1,000 word submission is an excellent exercise in editing, and I’ve found I can usually get rid of 200-300 words with no real loss of content.
The difference between editing while writing and doing a second draft is that when you read the work the next day, you are reading as a different person from the person who wrote it. If you can’t distance yourself from what you wrote, you will never edit yourself well - and editing yourself is far more important in writing than writing.
My wife just turned in a book targeted to 10 year olds, and it was very hard - though she has published three very successful books targeted to junior high kids. The problem is not just vocabulary and sentence structure, it is that 10-year olds just don’t have the background knowledge older people do.
When I was in grad school, we published two papers more or less at the same time on more or less the same subject, one in a survey journal which published tutorials, and one in the premier technical journal. We wrote them very differently.
Interestingly, though they each got cited about the same number of times, it was clear that people actually read the tutorial paper.