Monday, September 15, 2014

The Shitty First Draft

      Lamott says it perfectly, the first draft is like the little kid version of your essay, where anything is okay to say, because most people will not see it. You can make mistakes with your grammar (although if I catch grammar mistakes I will fix them because they are annoying!), leave blanks where words you can't think of should go, and just be yourself in your draft. You can put all your ideas in and just sort them out later. That is why its a draft, its not meant to be presentable the first time you write it. Revision will fix what needs to be fixed when you get there, but for the first draft, just write what you want to include in your paper. It's almost like digging for gold through your own paper. Say you have just written 3000 words, and the essay needs to be 1500. Go through the essay and start marking what you like or alternatively, start deleting or highlighting what you don't. Then with the remaining "good" writing, fix up the flow of the paper and see how it looks from there. If it needs more, go back and look at some of the stuff you got rid of, or if it needs less, just delete some more unnecessary information. The writing from this style seems like it would be a lot more personal too, which can be a good thing. It can show your passion for a topic and make your opinion present in an essay.

Overall, the idea of a shitty first draft is something I would like to try, but I tend to rigidly stick to rules I have learned it might be hard for me to do so.

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