Maker’s Eye Draft

Annotation:

• “That difference in attitude is the difference between amateur and professional, inexperience and experience, journeyman and craftsman. Peter F. Drucker, the prolific business writer, calls his first draft “the zero draft”–after that he can start counting. Most writers share the feeling that the first draft, and all of those which follow, are opportunities to discover what they have to say and how best they can say it.”

• “To produce a progression of drafts, each of which says more and says it more clearly, the writer has to develop a special kind of reading skill. In school we are taught to decode what appears on the page as finished writing. Writers, however, face a different category of possibility and responsibility when they read their own drafts. To them the words on the page are never finished. Each can be changed and rearranged, can set off a chain reaction of confusion or clarified meaning. This is a different kind of reading which is possibly more difficult and certainly more exciting.” As scholars when writing whether in or out of school, we often submit our initial draft or writing as our finished product without revision as we were taught. However, professional writers do the complete opposite. From a professional point of view only when the first draft is complete then they can begin their writing process. A finished piece of writing to a professional comes after lots of re-reading and re-writing, closely looking at each page, paragraph, sentence, and word to find other alternatives that will best get their message across to their readers and intended audience.

• “Then the writer, counsels novelist Nancy Hale, “should be critical of everything that seems to him most delightful in his style. He should excise what he most admires, because he wouldn’t thus admire it if he weren’t…in a sense protecting it from criticism.” John Ciardi, the poet, adds, “The last act of the writing must be to become one’s own reader. It is, I suppose, a schizophrenic process, to begin passionately and to end critically, to begin hot and to end cold; and, more important, to be passion-hot and critic-cold at the same time.” When professionals look over their first draft, they become critics of their writing. The writer must then revise their writing as a stranger so they can identify some of the flaws in their writing and how to best revise and alter said flaws ultimately making their writing easier for their audience to read and comprehend.