Have you ever watched a competitive baking show?
It’s stunning how invested we can get in those cakes and breads
- will they be overbaked or just right?
No one can tell until the judging takes place.
One thing that always gives me the jitters is when a contestant looks at their batter
and says,
“It’s not right; I’m starting over.”
I always want to scream at the TV, “but you don’t have time!”
What they really don’t have time for, though, is to stick with a version of their recipe
that won’t impress the judges.
Everyone in these shows seems to understand that baking isn’t just the final, successful
combination of mixing and layering and cooking.
It’s all the combinations it takes, including the missteps, to get to the final product.
In writing, drafting is like the process of baking a cake.
The way we respond to mistakes along the way matters just as much as the product.
There can be radical freedom in drafting to experiment and try things out
and see what works.
We’ve got some drafting techniques that will help us really work through this middle
step in the Writing Process.
That’s what we’re discussing today in Study Hall: Composition, presented by Arizona
State University and Crash Course.
I’m Yumna Samie, let’s get started.
So if you’ve been following along with us
in the Writing Process, we’ve learned how to generate ideas and how to prepare a plan.
Now, we’re going to talk about the work most of us recognize as “writing:” putting
words, sentences, and paragraphs to paper.
However, we’re going to call this step “drafting” instead of “writing” because writing is
too big and broad for what we’re talking about.
Writing, after all, encompasses the whole process, from invention to editing.
Drafting, on the other hand, has quite a few definitions;
one helpful way to define it is “a preliminary sketch, outline, or version, as in a first
draft of a treaty.”
It’s a reference to drawing, which gives us a good glimpse into this step of the process,
but the most important focus is the idea of ‘preliminary,’
something early and not necessarily complete.
Whatever we produce at this stage is supposed to be like a sketch, a little unfinished,
a little imperfect.
One draft implies there will be other, more polished drafts later on.
This is where the radical freedom of drafting comes in.
If we know that this one draft isn’t the last crack we’ll get at the problem, we
can try things out, make mistakes,
and keep moving forward, without getting stuck.
The worry that holds a lot of people back from drafting this way is the idea that things
might not work out.
Our first paragraphs and pages might not get where we want them to go,
so we might have to start all over again.
It’s true, the freedom of drafting is also the responsibility of drafting.
When we let ourselves write a loose or risky first draft, we’re responsible for resolving
any issues that arise in the next draft or during revisions.
The good news is that your trusty invention and planning steps have probably given you
the scaffolding you need to write good drafts.
Another comforting truth is that each draft can be source material for future drafts:
even if you completely start over, you can pull what you want from the first draft when
you’re writing a new one.
You’ll also come to a second or third draft with everything you’ve learned from earlier
versions.
No work is really wasted.
You’ll also find that the next step in the writing process, revision, may allow you to
change your drafts rather than starting over.
But more on that in the next video!
Your experience with drafting may come from a familiar term in school, a rough draft.
One way schools teach the writing process is to have us write a rough draft for a grade.
The truth is that most early drafts are somewhat rough, but assigning a draft focuses on that aspect.
When our assignments include a rough draft,
we may focus too much on pleasing the teacher or boss rather than on getting some useful
(or even wild) drafting work done.
We don’t get as much of that radical freedom.
Luckily, when you draft for yourself, not for other people, you get to use this step
in a way that works for you.
The most productive version of your drafts may or may not look like what you made for
an assignment.
If you’ve had a drafting assignment in the past that didn’t work for you, we think
it’s worth trying drafting on your own terms.
It could be much more useful this time.
There are plenty of tools to help us get words down on paper, move them around, and try things out.
Today, we’ll discuss time management, the freewriting draft, and delaying introductions
and conclusions.
Like the bakers on a competition show, we don’t have limitless time for the drafting phase.
So, we’ll need to use time management, making choices about how to divide up
our time for a project.
Let’s start by setting some limits.
Consider how long it takes to write a more-or-less full-length version of the project.
Our estimates won’t be perfect, but over time, we’ll get better at predicting our pacing.
Then, set aside the time it would take to write two full-length drafts instead of just one.
That way, after we finish our first attempt, we can evaluate whether it’s working.
And if it’s not, we still have the time to start from scratch,
because we set aside more time than we needed for a single go at drafting.
To make sure we’re setting aside enough time, we also probably want to speed up our
first draft process.
The Freewriting Draft is one way to do that!
Freewriting drafts are inspired by the idea of freewriting, which we discussed in our
Invention episode.
It’s about writing quickly rather than writing with exact formatting and accuracy.
So yes, that means sometimes using repetitive word choices, or long, winding sentences,
and also just leaving yourself notes like
[FUTURE ME: look up the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow].
Drafting can create a contrast between our expectations and reality.
You’ll see the differences between your imagined draft
and the real draft in front of you.
And hey, having some words in front of you, even if those words are scattered,
is way less intimidating than staring at a blank page when you’re struggling to write.
If you aren’t achieving the core goals of your project yet, don’t panic.
Consider how much the first freewriting draft teaches you about the draft
that will eventually work.
After all, the inventor Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000
ways that won’t work.”
One other way that people keep their drafts nice and quick while reducing the stress of
drafting is to leave introductions and conclusions for last.
Often, writing an introduction can feel a bit like running up to a stranger at a party
and introducing them to the rest of the room before you’ve met them yourself.
It makes sense to know what the actual content of the writing project is before you try to
set it up for other people.
Plus, introductions and conclusions can make us focus on getting the precise phrasing right
in early drafts
when we may still massively change the direction of the project.
So one great strategy is to first write the body paragraphs,
everything but the introduction and conclusion.
Then, you can evaluate that draft and maybe make big changes.
By making changes to the body paragraphs first, you can avoid having to rewrite early versions
of the introduction and conclusion quite so often.
When you’re really confident that you’ve gotten to a solid draft of the middle,
that’s when you can write a first draft of the introduction and conclusion.
That all being said…
while many people get great results from this nonlinear drafting technique,
don’t let it be the thing that slows you down
and makes you anxious in the writing process.
If you need an intro and conclusion for every draft, so be it -- do what you need to do!
Drafting techniques can feel a little abstract, so let’s talk through a real-world example
with a Writer in Action.
Collette is in charge of writing this year’s letter to the donor list to raise money for
her honeybee conservation nonprofit, Bees on Earth.
Collette uses two drafting techniques to get started once she’s done some invention and planning:
she focuses on writing a quick Freewriting Draft of the body paragraphs, leaving the
introduction and conclusion for later.
Rather than getting hung up on the salutation and how to make
a great first impression on the donors,
she starts with her core points: her nonprofit achieves results and bee populations are growing
in their part of the country.
After her freewriting draft, however, she realizes that she needs a much larger section
about this year’s new bee protection techniques.
The letter, she realizes, needs to raise money to cover implementation costs for things like
hive installations and native plant gardens.v
She chooses to write a new draft, with a much bigger focus on what her nonprofit is planning
to do to save the bees.
And she pulls phrases (including one bee pun) from the first draft whenever she wants to.
Once those core paragraphs feel good, Collette finds it much easier
to create the perfect opener;
after all, she now knows exactly what she’s introducing.
She also adds a great conclusion sentence with a clear call-to-action to attend Hive-Minded,
their annual fundraiser.
Collette braved the scary and exciting freedom to draft and then draft again, and as a result,
she’s better prepared for the rest of the writing process.
Plus, the bees stand to get more funding next year.
Collette is a Writer in Action!
With Collette’s example, we see how it’s normal to write multiple drafts,
not a sign of failure.
Writing multiple drafts is just how we figure out what we want our writing project to look like.
Here are some reminders as you write a draft:
First, drafting frees us to become messier, faster writers.
We know we can change our initial drafts and do the nitty-gritty work of fixing them in
the upcoming revision step.
Second, drafting also makes us responsible:
we’re responsible for trying something different if we can see that a first draft isn’t working.
Finally, drafting involves believing that we have better writing in us that we can use
on the second or third draft.
Much like those competition bakers know a bad bake when they see it,
we can learn to recognize when a draft has left the path we want to follow.
It doesn’t mean that we are bad writers: it means that we’ve learned everything we
can from that approach, and we’ve got to try something else.
Those champion bakers don’t settle for a cake that isn’t fluffy and delicious, and
you don’t have settle with your writing either.
Just keep drafting!
Next time, we’ll explore how the next step, revision,
can help us see our work with a new perspective and improve the clarity and quality
of our writing tasks.
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Composition, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course
in the links in the description.
See you next time!