Purpose Of First Draft

The Purpose of First Drafts When students must write an essay they often struggle with the starting process of coming up with the idea and once they’ve even done that they may struggle with figuring out how to start it. This makes writing the first draft the hardest, especially for inexperienced writers, for example student writers, who often feel like they’re expected write perfectly the first time. First drafts are the first version of a paper that someone has written, with the number of drafts varying depending on the writer and when they feel that they’ve accomplished what they want to with that piece of writing. Anne Lamott’s article Shitty “First Drafts” writes about how important first drafts are in her revision process, and describes her personal process of writing. Also, Doug Downs’ article “Revision is Central to Developing Writing” helps further the importance of first drafts, and even further the revision process. The mentality that we must
When Lamott talks about how she would “worry that people would read what [she’d] written” (Lamott 529) in her first draft, her worry is coming from the culture that surround professional writers. That being that professional writers should know how to write properly, with accepted conventions, such as grammar. Since it’s more of the society’s overall norms, the writer can become constrained to follow a set path in what they feel they can write. If someone failed to write a first draft which leads them to new discourse and ideas, then it would hinder their goal. This fear of not writing perfectly, which in this case the norms imposed come from a classroom setting, is explained well by Brookes and Carr in their article “Failure Can be an Important Part of Writing Development” (Brookes, Carr 63). They say