Drafting

Once we finish prewriting, we are ready to begin drafting, the second major step in the writing process, a step to which we might find ourselves returning throughout the creation of our document. In fact, the drafting and revising might occur many times before the document is really for editing.

Our first draft is often a "fast-write" (Writing Exploratory Essays, p. 11), a draft that is written quickly without stopping to worry about the finer points of style. The main goal of a fast-write is to get our ideas into words, those words into sentences, those sentences into paragraphs, and those paragraphs into some sort of order. In subsequent drafts, we can rearrange paragraphs, fine-tune the style, add transitional devices, make the introduction reflect the actual content of our document.

In other words, writing a draft is really an act of self-expression--it is our way of seeing what we know and what we don't yet know. It is our way of finding the holes in our argument or the places where more information, evidence, or explanation is needed.

It is often helpful to think of drafts as having different foci. The early drafts are Idea Drafts, drafts focused on developing our ideas. How many Idea Drafts we need to write depends upon several things, such as the extent of our knowledge of the topic and the scope of the document. Often we need a fast-write, an Idea Draft, and an Expanded Idea Draft before moving on to the Audience Draft(s).

Once we have our ideas fully developed, we can focus on the needs of our audience. What do our readers need to know? When do they need to know it? Which terms might our readers not recognize or understand? Which points require more explanation or more evidence to be convincing? The Audience Draft(s) is the place where our self-expression begins to turn into communication. In other words, here we organize our developed ideas in the most effective order for our readers.

As the name suggests, Style Drafts are the place where we focus on word-level and sentence-level issues. Here we try to make at least some of our phrasings memorable. Here we seek exactly the right word or phrase to express our idea. Here we consider the emotional appeal of language as well as its communicative aspects.

Finally, we write the Polished Draft(s). Here we do the editing, checking on everything from keeping our verb tenses consistent to making the grammar correct. Although the editing stage comes last, it is important to remember that our ethos (our personality that is revealed in the document, our credibility) often depends heavily upon correctness and felicity of phrasing.

It should be clear that all the stages of drafting (and the writing process as a whole) is recursive; in the process of writing the Expanded Idea Draft, we will often have to return to prewriting activities to develop new material and/or we will write exactly the right sentence for expressing our idea. Or while writing the Polished Draft, we might suddenly realize that the idea itself rather than the phrasing is confusing.

The following sites offer information and assistance related to drafting.

• General Guides for Writing Expository Prose
  Source: Harvard University
  
• Introductions
  Source: Harvard University


• Conclusions
  Source: Harvard University


• Strategies for Overcoming Writer's Block
  Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  
• Forecasting