What do you think this essay is saying about the writing process generally, and how do you think it could affect your writing process in particular? How could it apply to your writing of the Education Narrative Essay?
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I think this essay is saying that the writing process generally doesn’t happen on the first try. Writers and professional writers don’t always have their first draft as their final one. It takes multiple tries with improvements to finally achieve the right writing. This affects my writing process in particular by giving me hope that just writing things down at first is the best step to start writing something big. Even if we are stuck or scared that we don’t have the best stories or writing it only could be better if we try and keep trying. This applies to the Narrative essay because writing some things down and revising them will help us come up with the best writing. If we write the essay last minute and submit it, it’s not the best version of the writing because it doesn’t have the time and improvements it needs. Like it says in the essay our first drafts are always bad but the more we read it out loud, change some parts, check grammar, and overall revise it will be the one we all want to let others read. It always connects back to getting better at writing from our first essay to our recent essays. The more we write and be better at writing the less we will have drafts before the final one.
When Anne Lamott talks about first drafts, she views them as a way to let her ideas flow and doesn’t value the composition of her writing to start. Being able to write down her thoughts and not worry about who will read it or what others will think bring out the raw ideas and from there, the drafts that follow will keep the best parts and remove filler. I think that this is a great technique because I believe when we write we first try to make a polished piece as a foundation, when in reality we only need our “skeleton” of ideas as I would call it to build on top of. I actually attempted to use this strategy in my own writing but to a much smaller scale, I wrote my ideas and the general form of where certain things would go and with that in my opinion, I wrote better than how I usually do.
The author, Anne Lamott, describes that while the writing process isn’t easy, you must take your time and not worry about perfection in the beginning stages. The author describes the steps needed to complete a paper in this essay. The first step is to write a basic and unimportant first draft, when writing your first draft, you shouldn’t automatically assume that the first draft will be your last and final draft. On your first draft you write about anything that pops into your head and put it on paper. Once you do that, you must find all the little mistakes and errors you found while rereading and write that as your second draft. On the third draft, you need to include the fixed work that you wrote on your second draft and add onto what you wrote so it can have an improved sound and quality. This writing process would be very effective for me because it would help me brainstorm about some of the things I would want to talk about in my writing instead of using whatever comes up and editing as I go.
This essay from Anna Lemott describes the process of writing a well-prepared essay. Anna talks about how an article is rare to come out perfect in the first draft; the first draft can always become better. Professional writers take the time to revise their work multiple times to make sure it is ready for the reader to have a great experience when reading the article and knowing that even the most famous writer takes their time to look over their work, as many times as they should. It makes me confident enough to write down a first draft to write down my ideas and shape up my essay, and take the time later to revise it well to sculpt it more so that it is more peculiar and suitable for people to read. I follow this concept when writing down my narrative essay. Make sure my ideas are well-written and well-expressed. Anna helped me realize the time I should take to write down my papers and how I shouldn’t rush them at the last minute.
I think the message that is trying to be conveyed through this essay is that writing like any other art is a series of mistakes and inspirations. Not everything you do will be done perfectly on the first try to succeed is to fail and learn from their mistakes. Because if your every work is perfect you can no longer improve as a writer, which would cause the quality of your work to stagnate. The essay encourages me to not be disheartened or disappointed if my work isn’t the best, that means it has room for improvement like an uncut diamond. This applies to my essay because it can always be improved, I just have to find the area in which both the essay and I need to improve.
I really think that the first draft is not going to be perfect in the way that it is the first and last thing you are going to write. The first draft is just so that the ideas flow and the person writing has an idea and can then make changes to their writing. The first draft will usually have a defect. Even if you are a good writer you would consider making drafts to help gather your ideas and have better writing. A draft would help me a lot in writing my essay since it helps me a lot with my ideas, not very organized ideas but when I want to write my final draft I could have the ability to make changes and put all my ideas in order and make sense of what I want to write
This essay is saying that the writing process never comes easy even for the best writers, it’s natural to have bad first drafts, so continuously working and editing it would enhance them. We should get our thoughts down on paper and then return to it to write another draft. This affects my writing process in particular because I tend to have random sentences pop into my head, never write them down, and try to get them right in my head. This leads me to end up losing my train of thought, so writing everything out would help me when I look back at it with a clear head. In connection to my education narrative essay, I know that I won’t get a submittable version the first time around so continuously going back to the essay to edit things would help me write the best version I can.