Process,
Process, Process
The Raw & The
Cooked. If you invite a friend round for a meal, you don’t just serve up the raw ingredients. You prepare the ingredients, cook them and then put something attractive and tasty on the table. It’s the same with essay writing: you should never hand in a first draft. Throughout this guide, I’ve
emphasised that essay writing, like all writing, is a process. This
means that any piece of finished writing will have passed through
a number of different versions as the writer tried to make it as good
as she could.
Drafting & Editing – What They Mean. ‘Drafting’ means ‘making a preliminary or tentative version, sketch or outline of something’. ‘Editing’ means ‘making suitable for publishing or public presentation’ and
has senses of selecting, amending and revising. The two activities
are closely related. Publishers employ editors to work with authors
on first drafts of new books.
What The Professionals Say. Here are some of the things that
writers have said through the ages about drafting, editing and revising.
“Of every four words I write, I strike out three” – Nicolas
Boileau, 1665
“I constantly rewrite” – Thornton
Wilder, 1961
“I do a lot of rewriting. I find that the more versions you see […] the more you get it right in the end” – William
Trevor, 1989