Shitty First Drafts

In “Shitty First Drafts,” Lamont is trying to get her audience to reconsider the assumption that good writers create first drafts that are almost perfect and that need very little revision.   Because in reality all writers write shitty first drafts that need lots of revision and re-revision to get them up to par with what we expect from them.  This is an easy assumption to fall into; it’s easy to look at a piece of writing from someone else and see this great piece of writing that flows together so perfectly and think, "wow, writing comes so easily to them."  That they just sat there and wrote it all at once and the words just naturally flowed onto the page.  But in all reality they spent just as much time as we do trying to draft their writing.  I feel that part of the reason this assumption is so prevalent is because in school writing classes we are always told to bring a rough draft in as part of the writing process.  But this rough draft is often the first time we are putting the words into sentences and paragraphs and this draft is usually expected to be the majority of the paper written down.  So it’s easy to get the mindset that our rough draft is our first draft.  And the rough draft is usually one of the final most drafts of our paper and is written much better then the strings of ideas we had before sitting down and writing.   These strings of ideas could be more seen as our first drafts.  Lamont believes the actual process of writing goes a little more like the first draft is the draft where you just get everything down on paper.  The second draft you fix it up and the third draft is where you check everything.     

Wikipedia allows us access to people’s shitty first drafts by allowing us to view history.  We can look at how the article looked in the very beginning which in some cases is just a few sentences about the topic.   This is beneficial because it allows us to see the writing process in use and in a different way.  It’s not always easy to see the writing process when looking back on our own writing.  But when you’re looking at an article that was edited by many people over time it allows us a better picture of the writing process at work.