In my work as a writing instructor and tutor, I’ve often been asked simply to sit with a student as he or she drafts a writing assignment. My role in such situations is to provide moral support while simultaneously serving as a sounding board, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a grammar rule book, and a cheerleader. As a cheerleader, 95% of my work involves coaxing students to put their ideas on the page, even if those ideas aren’t yet fully formed, and even if the words used to express those ideas aren’t strung together in perfectly formed and flawlessly elegant sentences. 100% of the time, my students are reluctant to take this advice.
It’s not surprising that writers are overwhelmingly reluctant to drop anything less-than-seemingly-perfect onto the page. Pop culture leads us to believe that “good writing” is about using commas and big words correctly. Standardized exams, college admissions criteria, and even some educators do little to refute the idea that a piece of writing qualifies as “good” as long as it contains an impressive array of big words and perfectly placed commas. Moreover, the published writing that we see in textbooks or novels or magazines or newspapers offers a misleading look at the writing process, concealing the fact that published texts reach their highly polished state of seeming perfection only after having been read and revised and read and revised and read and revised again by several people who have dedicated their lives to writing. Finally, the act of writing is a deeply personal process that opens us up to failure and criticism in ways that few other acts do. No one wants to risk falling short of perfection in their writing.
And so writers wait in cautious reluctance, hesitating to put anything at all on the page until we know exactly what we want to say, why we want to say it, what impressive words we’ll use to say it, and where to put the commas that will inevitably demand to be included in our thoughts.
In this manner, so many thoughts – good thoughts, creative thoughts, academically worthy thoughts, challenging thoughts, thoughts that could make all the difference in someone’s life- have died a quiet death somewhere between the writer’s mind and the blank page.
I implore you not to let your thoughts die in such a fashion! Hurl them onto the page, even if they take the form of random, disjointed, misspelled words! String them together into sentences, even if you find out later that some or all of the sentences aren’t actually complete sentences or that they use commas in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways. Bring your good, creative, worthy, challenging, perhaps life-altering thoughts to life, even if you find yourself momentarily unable to think of a better word than “thing” or “stuff” or “it” or “interesting.” Build them into paragraphs, pages, and essays, even if you find out later that your ideas are jumbled together in an unhelpful order, or that your argument contains holes big enough to accommodate a freight train, or that you’ve wandered into a forest of tangential ideas.
Just get the ideas onto the page, no matter how awful or disjointed or meaningless or silly or grammatically wrong or misspelled they may initially look. Once they’ve leapt from your mind, they can be shaped and trimmed and revised and moved and tweaked. They can walk with more experienced writers; they can journey towards perfection through the feedback of readers who engage with the ideas behind the imperfect words; they can confront you as strangers, helping you see your very own thoughts with new eyes, a new perspective, and probably some new words. Polishing words that have landed on the page is the easy part – it’s the bit about getting them onto the page that takes a leap of faith.
This leap becomes easier to make when you realize that the first draft is not a platform for perfection. Rather, the first draft is an exercise in persuading ideas to leave your mind and take up residence on the page. That being the case, it is no cause for alarm if your first draft makes no sense – first drafts often don’t. Moreover, first drafts often use bizarre words that don’t fit the context. They often contain incomplete sentences and glaring grammatical errors. They almost always bundle unrelated or only marginally related ideas together in completely illogical ways. They make false or unsupportable claims. They fail to account for a quarter or more of the criteria laid out in the assignment prompt. In short, first drafts are usually pretty awful.
And that’s OK. It’s perfectly normal for a first draft to be awful. Indeed, first drafts are sometimes referred to as “exploratory drafts,” the idea behind this name being that the writer uses the draft to explore ideas, not to explain them with clarity, logic, and perfect grammar. Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to let your ideas roam freely across the blank page, becoming transformed as you write your way to the end of a first draft that will almost certainly be disjointed, illogical, meandering, and full of weird language-use errors. Remind yourself frequently – I keep a sticky note bearing this message on my computer monitor – that it is easier to revise words on a page than to pull ideas from your mind.
Write with revision in mind, and hesitate no more — no one expects perfection on the first draft!
Tune in again next week for my comments on time and what to do as a writer when you haven’t got any of it.
Happy Writing!
Dr. Lori
Engaging Texts: Has Your Text Been Engaged? 