Shitty First Draft Analysis

It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

Writing varies from a text message to a novel. Writers often have a difficult task in creating a piece of work that truly identifies the meaning of good writing. Every good writer usually starts with the basics such as genre, audience, rhetorical situation, and reflection of the piece. Throughout this semester, we have gone through all of these key terms in great detail with each new assignment that has come our way. In doing this, not only as students but also as writers, we have come to create our own theory of writing. Every writer has a different theory of writing though most are very similar. Now, at this point in the semester after doing countless journals, in-class exercises, and final assignments, I think I have figured out my own

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

From writing thoughtful poems to research papers, I have experienced composing a diverse portfolio of literary analysis and criticisms throughout the school year. I started out the year writing minimally. By the end of the year, I noticed I was able to express my ideas and thoughts in a more clear and concise way on paper. Ultimately, each composition allowed me to widen my horizons as a writer and see how I could improve as a writer.

Within the past eight weeks, I have realized my strengths and weaknesses within the writing process. I have realized that I do not utilize the first step within the writing process of prewriting. However, for the drafting, revising, and polishing steps of the writing process, I am very familiar and use additional resources to strengthen the writing assignment. I create multiple drafts, which includes revising and polishing in each step. Therefore, I use all three of these steps in multiple drafts as I reach the final product for

In Freshman Composition I learned what metacognition means, and how it applies to academic writing. Next I learned about textual evidence and backing up your opinions with research. *I expect this class to help develop my writing skills, as well as find my voice in writing, all together I expect this class to be challenging but rewarding. Therefore I have set a few goals for myself, my first goal is to step out of my comfort zone and research topics I have never heard of before. My second goal is to not second-guess myself on my writing topics and/or choices. Furthermore I expect great things to come from this

“The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year” reflected my writing experience while I transitioned from elementary writer to a critical writer. Sommers and Saltz write, “freshmen need to see themselves as novice in a world that demands ‘something more and deeper’ from their writing than high school” (Sommers and Saltz 134). This line highlights the hardship that most students face when trying to write successfully. My earlier written works were much weaker than my current pieces because I often wrote for the sake of passing the class. While developing my writing, I focused on the new ideas that were introduced rather than limiting my argument to familiar techniques and ideas. Because of my new attitude towards writing, I began to demand

One’s writing is not always perfect. The idea that perfection lies within a piece of written work is justifiably erroneous. In an excerpt entitled, “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott, Lamott explores how writing as a whole is a revisiting process. Lamott opens by simply stating, “all good writers write them [shitty first drafts].” She then goes on to address how people view successful writers as enthusiastically approaching writing and that it is ultimately “easy” to compose a piece of work; Lamott states that this notion is merely a “fantasy of the uninitiated.”

My first thought when I was about to read “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott was, “Why there is so much hate towards First Drafts?” Like the title had so much hatred against Firs drafts; Then, I understood why. First drafts are very annoying and we consider them as mistakes, which from we create a better product that ends up being a great work. I thought the article “Shitty First Draft” was just going to be about how we need to do first drafts. Well, I was wrong. The article was about the author, Lamott trying to explain and teach to the young generation of writers the importance of a first draft and how it’s vital in writing. Lamott, explains why we need first drafts. and how every writer no matter how skilled they are, they need first drafts to create a great final product (unless you are one of those lucky writers which nobody likes because they can do a great wok in their first attempt). She reminds us also that the first draft is where we write all our ideas and thoughts, after we revise our first drafts then we can figure out what we can write about, like separate the useful ideas from the rest of the writing. First Paragraph is a way of getting a more clear idea of what a writer wants to write.

The first content written should never be the final copy; it should be the sloppiest bundle of ideas that the ideas are only there to be written out only to be considered later if important or not. I completely agree with what Anne Lamott is trying to say from the section “Shitty First Drafts” from “Bird by Bird”. Her writing process is a what should be, and usually is, used by every writer and student. Drafts are meant to be ‘sloppy’, as long as thoughts are on paper. Do not even bother adding words that are only there to make the paper seam worldly in a first draft . Use words and dialect that is comfortable to use and that will get the point across. Make it twice or even three times longer than what it originally was meant to be. Have

I hate portland, and I’m not 100% sure why. I guess I just feel like it doesn’t represent who I am and what I stand for. I am resilient and strong and I feel as if portland is too liberal to adequately show that.

Has the thought of revising your own paper makes you mad? Does the thought of it make your heart have a mini heart attack? What if I tell you that you’re not alone, would you believe me? In “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird it goes greatly into detail about how we all struggle with looking at our very own rough drafts. And I know numerous people, who feel the same way. One person, I know quite well is myself, almost all of my career as a writer I’ve cringed, during and while revising my first draft for any paper. I spent countless hours revising and rewriting my own papers and just ended up hating them even more than ever before. But after reading “Shitty First Drafts” I’ve learned to love and appreciate the beauty in my very own shitty drafts. I’ve come down to the conclusion that we need to come accept the intimacy that we have with our so-called “Shitty First Drafts.”

I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary