ABSTRACT
Writing is hard work. We don’t say this to discourage you, but to remind you of a fundamental fact. Regardless of what you do, you’ll be constantly challenged by the demands of everyday life. If you’re a student, in addition to these demands, you’ll have classes to attend, extensive reading lists to work through, and assignment deadlines to meet. Most likely, as the end of semester approaches, more than one assignment deadline will compete for your attention. You’ll be distracted by the easy affordances of the Internet: Facebook, Twitter, emails, and Google searches. Unless you can resist these temptations, the evening you’ve set aside to complete a writing assignment will have evaporated. Submitting a hastily assembled first draft is unwise. In this chapter, we describe the journey we take from first to final draft. We point out that producing a first draft is qualitatively different from producing subsequent ones. The first draft provides an opportunity to be as creative as you like, to write without self-censoring. In subsequent drafts, you progressively refine your project. In our own work, we enjoy the creativity afforded by the first draft and then the opportunity to craft tighter and more parsimonious drafts. We know there’s no such thing as a perfect final draft, but at a certain point, often dictated by a looming deadline, we are forced to admit that enough is enough.
