What Does Drafting Mean?

Writing (and reading) is a recursive process in which we discover what we mean to say and how we actually say it as we work on a piece of writing. The perfect final draft with dazzling insights, convincing arguments, and no grammatical errors doesn't happen in one draft. A lot of writing we do daily--emails, social media posts, rushed homework responses or memos at work--may be done in one draft: you get it down, check it over (maybe), and you're done. But the writing you will do for college or for other important tasks takes a process to produce. It takes drafts--multiple drafts. It is important, then, for you to have a sense of what it means to draft, as well as the different goals and questions to ask related to each draft.

Peter Elbow's compares the writing process to painting a picture. He sees drafting as "successive sketches of the same picture--the first sketches very rough and vague--each one getting clearer, more detailed, more accurate, and better organized as well" (29). Two things about his comparison are worth remembering:

#1: It is important to write a draft of your whole writing piece (not just part of it).
--In other words, try to express a complete articulation of what you mean to say. This sense of the whole message may not be there yet for you, but you can express as much as you are able.

#2: Your drafts grow from small to large, from "sketch" to complete picture, from rough to refined.
--This whole picture of your writing pieces could start with little detail and add development from draft to draft, or your writing pieces could be too developed and chaotic and you craft successively more refined drafts.

In explaining her writing process, Ann Lamott describes her approach drafting as she wrote food reviews for California magazine:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something--anything--down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft--you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy. (25)

While some writing pieces may take many more drafts, a similar three draft sequence can serve you well for college writing.

Draft #1: The Zero or Freewriting Draft
The first draft is your zero or freewriting draft where you get down your first sketch of your thinking on the topic in full draft form. You are not concerned at this point with correctness at all. You are not worried with "essay form" or specific support like quotes either. Just write from your head what you think on the topic. (For more see Approaching First Drafts.)

Draft #2: The Development Draft
The second draft is your Development Draft where you work on a clear expression of your thesis, you seek to organize your writing clearly and logically, and you try to include full support for your thesis. But at this point, you are still not worried about correct grammar or documentation. You might call this draft your first dress rehearsal of your final draft. (For more see Approaching Second Drafts.)

Draft #3: The Final Draft
You may do more than two drafts to get to this final draft, but at some point the paper is due and you will have to turn it in to be evaluated for a grade. Now this performance is going live before an audience, and you want to make it as good as you can. This final draft enables you to troubleshoot and improve your content (your approach to the writing task, thesis, organization, and support), but the focus for the final draft is on readability and careful editing and proofreading. (For more see Approaching Final Drafts).

As a writer, it is important to trust the process. What does this mean, "trust the process"? More than anything else, it means what you write at first, even what you write second (or third), is provisional. You don't have to write perfectly the first time, or the second or third. In fact, you should expect your drafts to be rough and in need of improvement. This is the agile mindset Space X has used to develop its rockets so quickly. Rather than building one perfect version, they build many prototypes and test them to failure each time to improve for the next version. Each prototype is a progressive step toward a better end goal.

Another important part of being agile and trusting the process of drafting is being open to changing your draft. These revisions could be major from changing your thesis, to seeing a whole section of your paper that needs to be replaced or moved, to improving the phrasing for one sentence. The writing process is a thinking process, and as we draft we grow our thinking, and as we re-think we also must revise our paper to reflect that new thinking. (Guide on Rethinking and Revision)

Trusting the drafting process means you have a mindset that understands and expects each version of your paper will be imperfect. Of course, we work to make the best version we can, but we know that each draft can be improved. It means being OK with producing rough, incomplete, and imperfect work along the way, but knowing that as we work on improving our draft and our thinking we will move closer to a finished draft that is good.

Trusting the drafting process means we expect to revise each draft once it is done and believe we improve our writing with each cycle of drafting and revision--and that is normal.

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 2007.

Image from Unsplash.

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