Start by getting something--anything--down on paper.
... the first draft is the down draft--you just get it down.
The second draft is the up draft--you fix it up.
You try to say what you have to say more accurately.
And the third draft is the dental draft,
where you check every tooth,
to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed,
or even, God help us, healthy.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Information gathering precedes drafting and may consist of sitting there thinking (brainstorming, doodling, clustering) to structured thinking (outlining) to archiving (annotated bibliography, field notes, interview transcripts, experiment reports) to data mining (gathering data from data repositories), and often some combination of several methods. While you probably don't want to start writing until you have gather considerable data, just as you don't want to speak without thinking, you will likely keep going back to and adding to your data even after you start writing about it. Once you have enough data to start drawing insights, it's time to start drafting.
Drafting is the process of taking your data and turning it into a coherent message. A complete draft is one that says pretty much everything that needs saying in order for the document to do what it needs to do. If writing were building, the draft would be a signed-off-on blueprint, the foundation laid, and the walls and the roof up. Structural changes at this point are possible but highly undesirable--unbuilding in order to rebuild is very expensive. But writing isn't building. You are working with ideas and words and using a digital medium so you can make big changes late in the process as long as you have the energy and courage to make them.
If you were to watch first-year students writing, you would see them writing the way a person reads. They start in the top left-hand corner and put down word after word, sentence after sentence, line by line. If they mistype, they will backspace from the moment they noticed the mistake back to the mistake, and retype, as if they are laying bricks (in space) rather then typing words on a screen. Finish the sentence, move on to the next. End one paragraph (often because it seems that paragraph is now long enough), move on to the next. Finish the last paragraph, reread from the top looking for spelling and punctuation errors. Done.
First-year students write in a straight line because they are accustomed to timed writing assignments and word counts and because they don't understand the difference between proofreading and revising. When they do have the luxury of writing something over a period of days or even weeks, they prefer to wait until the last moment and then let deadline anxiety focus their attention, essentially replicating the timed writing assignment scenario even when there's time for a more sophisticated writing process. Straight-line writing only works if you really know what you are talking about and what your readers want. It also helps if your readers don't actually need what you have to say in order to do their jobs, a situation that only exists in school. If your boss needs your work to do their job correctly, and you send them some half-baked jumble of sentences. . . .
If you were to watch experienced researchers writing, you would see a very different process, an iterative rather than linear one and one enacted over multiple days rather than a few hours in a row. Experienced writers type an idea, maybe a complete sentence, maybe just a keyword or a subject heading. If they can think of what needs to be said next, they might write a few more sentences, maybe a dozen more if they have a single idea square in their sites. You would see them pause to think, re-read what they just wrote, add something, maybe delete a line or two. Pause to think some more. They might stare at a single sentence for five minutes. If an idea occurs to them that seems important but not closely enough related to be in the same paragraph, they will enter a blank line and then write the sentence down or a key word or a heading. If the idea seems more distantly related, they might add half a dozen blank lines to remind them of the distance. If the two ideas are closely related, but they aren't quite sure how yet, they might just write the word "transition" on a separate line and keep writing. If the experienced researcher isn't certain the idea belongs at all, she might write it down and put a question mark beside it. She may also leave notes to herself, reminders to do something with a section next time she sits down to work on it, or a brief list of other topics she needs to add but doesn't yet have enough time or knowledge for. Or maybe just a question in [square brackets] or a different color, to make sure she doesn't leave it behind when she sends the final version.
Experienced researchers draft in expanding and collapsing outline form because they don't want to forget ideas as they occur to them, but they also know that ideas don't tend to arrive in optimum order, and they don't want to jumble different ideas together -- associative thinking is fine for drafting but readers can't read associative writing because all the implicit knowledge that instantaneously leads the researcher from A to G is missing from the reader's perspective until the writer goes back and fills in the blanks.
You will also see experienced researchers stare hard at a paragraph for minutes at a time, then highlight it and stare some more, and then, sigh, hit delete. Unwriting is a BIG part of effective drafting, and by far the hardest lesson to learn because it feels like going backwards. Travelling even faster down the wrong path won't get you home any quicker.
Transitions --definition of a transition, diffentiated from a forecast -- list of transition words and phrases -- grouped by applicationThis outline is an interior monologue. I wrote it for my eyes only, to remind me what I needed to do when I came back. I may move that place holder outline before I fill in its blanks. I may just delete it without ever filling in the blanks. And yes, I might even flesh out the outline and then kill the whole section. #$h!*.
By the way, when I wrote that outline, I wrote the second item down first, then the third, then went back to the top and added the first, and then I appended "diffentiated [sic.] from a forecast". The outline didn't arrive in order. I didn't spell all the words correctly either and didn't stop to worry about it. When you read the section on transitions you will notice that the finished version is slightly different still (I moved forecasting to the bottom of the section). To me, that's first-level drafting in a nutshell -- get the ideas down; fuss a bit with a preliminary order; write some more; go back and re-think the order; fill in some blanks; move on; come back.
Critically, experienced researchers schedule multiple drafting sessions, letting their ideas ferment in the back of their minds and their thoughts distance themselves from their words, so that when they return to a draft, they can see their work with fresh eyes and greater clarity.
The flawed writing process that novice researchers employ is partially the fault of the education system they came up in, timed writing assignments, specified word counts, uninterested readers. But novices tend to turn in drafts because they don't always realize what they've written doesn't match what they are thinking.
For researchers, novices and experienced researchers alike, objective interpretation of our own writing is difficult. The nature of that difficulty is neatly explained by the following excerpts, both of which come from a book you should read called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners". Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The star-Spangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener's job was to guess that song, based on the rhythm being tapped.
Most people guess 50% will guess right.
Only 2.5% of the participants guessed the song correctly.
Why are we so bad at predicting this? Because we can clearly hear the tune we are humming and imagine therefore that our tapping is a perfect representation of the same. Try it. It's not.
If you draft some ideas until they make sense to you, and then walk away and do something else for a few hours, or better yet a day, when you return the tune you were humming will be gone and you will be able to hear what the words are really saying.
Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills high school, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchens, and California Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown.
No school next Thursday.
When we are drafting, especially early on, we are so close to the words we can't see the page. We are so focused on the details we fail to see the implications; we bury the lead, as the journalists say. For most readers, the implications are what matter. No student or parent cares why school is closed on Thursday so much as they care to know that it is. Recipients of research findings are more interested in the results and the implications of the results than they are in the data and only fellow researchers are interested in the methodology that created that data.
Time, the psychological equivalent of distance, allows you to see more clearly what your words are actually saying as well as the implications of your data.
Drafting is really iterative, even if I write about it as though it is linear. Some people think and read and read and think and then when they draft their sentences just arrive in the right order correctly formed. Most people don't do that. Most people draft, revise, draft some more revise again and when they send submit they wish they could take it back and work on it some more.