Anne Lamott's Essay Analysis: Shitty First Draft

Daniel Tan
Professor William Wend
English 101-601
28 May 2014
Shitty First Drafts
Practice makes perfect, a common idiom to try to perfect in some particular activity. In this essay, Anne Lamott describes the case of writing horrendous first drafts on an essay or a research paper. She designates how she went through her writing process. Anne tries to explain that ‘shitty first drafts’ needs a great idea to begin with and on to writing the next draft(s). Creating the order of the drafts by making a subpar first drafts can lead to a good second drafts and an excellent third draft, or the final copy. She assumes that writing is not rapturous. The only way to create masterpiece(s) is to start in something small, which in this case, to create
In this child’s draft of just visions and impulsive thoughts, she lets it all gush out and let it slope all over the place, thinking that only yourself are going to see it and shape the draft later. After cutting out lines and phrases that she doesn’t need, she would continue on to rewriting a better second draft. She used to write food reviews for a California magazine; from there, the writer learned a lot that food reviewing was not only typing and commenting on the food but it also need a clear structure of explanation. Lastly, Lamott tells readers that this whole rough drafts process is just a persisting cycle, and it will soon happen again. If I use some of these techniques that Lamott mentioned in this paper, then maybe I can begin to have some comfort when writing my first draft and to create wonderful pieces of art that are out of my potential. No matter how “shitty” the first copy may be,
Everyone tries to write them instead in order to make better drafts. This essay actually reflected in my writing experience when I tried to make a rough draft for my paper or a review on the internet. I never thought that creating a rough draft was extremely important when it comes to creating an essay. I have realized that it is really hard to make a perfect essay without a rough sketch at first. In this article, I really enjoyed and felt interested in what Anne Lamott had to say about writing a ‘shitty first draft’ because it made me feel better and comfortable about my writing experience. I assume everyone have never been happy with the first drafts, including me. The first time I take a look at my first draft, I feel that this draft could have improved way beyond than I would have written. But by looking carefully at the first draft, I consider that rough first draft really helps me a lot to think a better draft. For instance, whenever I see restaurant critics around the Internet, some people really write a lot and take their effort to their top to review about that specific restaurant and it’s overall feature. I thought that was a complete long unnecessary review. In my opinion, this is how some people start to write a good paper. Whenever it comes to a review, all I have done was just gave them a quick score depend on the satisfactory level that I receive