Drafting Process
Transcript
Fidel Montero: My typical way of drafting my work, again, varies depending on what I’m writing. If I’m writing something out to the community, for example, I always make sure that when I write my first draft I always tell myself “this is not going anywhere- this is for me to get my ideas on paper” and I go through it I read it again and if I’m satisfied with it, then I structure it in a way where I can give it to somebody else to give it to somebody else and get feedback. Once I get feedback from somebody, I go through the first step of rewriting it in the way that it’s going to go out to the community, and again, once before I send it out and publish it to several thousand people I give it to somebody else to read- usually one of our English teachers.
James Christensen: I struggle a lot with how to write or how to approach the end product I want. There are two tricks I use, one of them is that I’ll say, ok I’m going to do… I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it an outline, but I’ll write talking points, I want to communicate that bodies are important; the spirit is more important than the body in terms of who should dominate and the natural man… And I’ll write talking points, don’t worry about examples, don’t worry about quotes, just what’s the idea I want to get across. The other way is if I don’t have it formulated that clearly in my mind… I will spew.. I use that word if I try to look at the page and write something smart, I never get… I freeze up completely, and so I just start writing; I don’t care about the order, whatever occurs to me, and I write quickly as if I were thinking out loud. And then with the basis of that big bulk of unedited material, I can go back and start putting it together and once I have that sort of rough stuff, then I can clean it up. And that works most successfully for me.
Shanna Butler: I have all the research in my head, then I start writing it in my head and finally when I have a pretty clear picture of where I want to go, then I start typing. I don’t start typing until then and it might take two weeks until that process is done. I write it all at once, it might be a half an hour, it might be an hour, it doesn’t take very long because I’ve been working on it in my head for so long.
Susan Black: usually have a team of research assistants—you can’t write this much and do it all yourself. They go to the library, and let’s say I am writing on the early years of Christ. I have them find all the books, and I am a very fast reader, so I can speed read. I then take the books home and as I do it, I am speed reading pretty fast and I say “oh that is interesting” and I circle it, despite the fact that it is a library book, I gotta make sure I have a pencil in hand. I circle it here, and I circle it here and then I take all the books to the office and here is another truckload of books and I just read. I have the secretaries type up everything that I have underlined or put a note out to the side of and I make sure that they tell me the page number and the source so I never write from a blank page. After it is all in, I may have three, four, five hundred pages and none of it is my work. I ask them to keep the quotes together, never split it up on a page. Then I go through it like paper dolls and I cut the whole thing apart. I have a table at my home that’s a long table, you’d say it’s a high councilman table and actually it is one of the most prized possessions, and I take all these strips and I put it all out in the order I wish to write in. I put it all out, typically, I write more biographical than topical—topical is more hard for me. I put it biographical—notice none of it is my words—I tape it on 8.5 by 11 papers and I bring it back to the secretaries and I say, put this in order just how it was. This is chapter one, here are all the quotes that I need, here is chapter two, here are all the quotes and the references. When I hit the computer, I am writing to the quote and it is a creative process. I never write one chapter, I write the whole book at once. I can stay up night after night on little bits of energy. I used to work in a bakery when I was a kid so I am used to the early bakers hours, so I just write the whole thing. There are many subjects that I have written about that I wasn’t quite confident in with the cut paste method and when I got to the end I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel about it and then finally I go, “Oh! This is it!”
Abe Mills: As far as drafting goes, I guess I just have the personality where I hate to go back over stuff and do it over again. And maybe there’s probably only about 95% of the population that agrees with me, so it’s important, but what I try to do is when I first start out, you know, if you can get a good outline . . . I try to get a good outline. First of all, I just write down ideas as they come and sometimes I’ll write down a whole paragraph the way that I feel like it should sound, and I’ll just keep writing that down, so I might end up with just four or five pages of just ideas here and there that don’t even go together. Then what I’ll do is I’ll generally go back and look through those ideas. I’ll make as detailed of an outline as I can, and then that sets me up for when I write the long version to hopefully not have to come back and re-do it too much.
Terry Olson: I am the king of the drafts as it were. I seem to do that more than necessary but I know that I get farther down the road getting something done if I keep writing and revising than if I just think about it.
Susan Meyer: For a science paper, always the best place to start is with how you are going to present the data—all the charts and graphs and what the main take home messages of the data are, because that is really your plot for the rest of the paper. I always do the data presentation first. Some people don’t do that, they say I can do the materials and methods part, that’s the easy part, I don’t have to know what any of it means to that, but I find that not a good idea and I never let my students do that. I say, you have to do the data presentation, figure out what your story is because a science paper has to have a story, just a bunch of data is not going to do it, it needs a plot or no one will read it, so I make them identify their story. And then I say the best way to do this is to write the abstract first—if you can’t say what you found out in 250 words, you are not ready to write the paper. Start at the beginning and write it through from beginning to end, after you decide what the data presentation is going to be.
Geoffrey Germane: The process of writing a report begins long before actually putting words on a page or typing words into a word processor.
After we have gathered our background data, including inspections of vehicles and accident sites, we then analyze the information, synthesize it, and then start to write. We write to summarize what we have done. We write to present our opinions and conclusions.