Shitty Drafts

Joseph Dineen
WRIT 101
9/16/14
Shitty Drafts

​ Just write anything down it doesn’t matter what it is, just let words flow. Words to live by as a writer apparently. As I am not a writer it is a little bit harder than that. Sometimes words don’t come to mind, but a good point none the less. I can appreciate the fact that it is okay to have a rough draft of a piece not make any sense. I guess that it is good practice to keep your mind active and generate ideas. Plus, what else is a draft for? It’s there so that you can correct and make improvements so that your final draft is polished. When I read this the thought came to mind that “You can’t polish a turd.” But apparently you can and that’s what makes writers good. Being able to take their terrible first draft and slowly polish it into a diamond.
​ Any and every thought should be written down, re-structuring and editing comes later. Why not? It makes sense to me. I can’t recall all of the times that I had a paper to write and just concentrated on what I was trying to voice. I wanted that final draft the first time. As you could imagine it didn’t turn out well. I’m going to take to heart what I read and literally write down anything that comes to mind whether it is good or bad, or even if it doesn’t make sense. That is what the red pen is for. I really don’t care if my paper looks like a football teams’ playbook any more. It is just room for improvement and may even make revisions easier because I won’t have to fight to find mistakes.
​ Not everyone is an all-star writer and that is why there is a thing called editing and drafts. If you are one of those all-stars then good for you. The majority of us suck at writing and need this process to get that A paper that we all want. I for one really, really need drafts so that I can even have a paper that makes any sense at all. I was grateful to read this article because now I feel that all is okay in my writing life and I can breathe a sigh of relief. Even as I write this I’m just doing what I read I’m just writing stuff down, so if there is a bunch of errors, bear with me. I think that after reading this and applying it to school it will get the juices flowing and help make me be a more creative writer. I wish that all aspects of writing were this easy but as always, it isn’t. It may be a hard thing for me to do because I’ve been doing it wrong for so many years, so here’s to the future!