What Does Drafting Look Like?

 

           Drafting can be a bare-boned skeleton, waiting to get dressed/fleshed up. Drafting can be a branch of a tree, whittled down to a match stick. Some people write a lot, and edit down. Others write the bare essentials and beef it up. Drafts can be ugly and messy and flawed, because we know that’s not going to be it’s final form. Is this what we're reminding students (and ourselves)?
Here's some feedback about drafting from the teachers of Hyde Park MS:
"Drafting... helps to get your ideas down without the stress of it needing to be perfect.”
"Drafting during the writing process allows a writer to plan out their writing...it is the blueprint for the final copy."
"[Drafting organizes] one's thoughts/ideas."

"It’s Only A Rough Draft" 1 Simple Thing

          When we think of drafting and revision, we might picture something like this. In reality, writer's don't usually make all those changes in ink, but our document editing history probably tells a similar (and less visually terrifying) story. By the time I'm finished, my document has seen outlines, annotated bibliographies, hurried notes, bullet points, run-on and fragment sentences, and many other kinds of messes that are necessary for moving on. 

OWL Excelsior

 While revising, it's important for your students to see in the big picture in their drafts, so that they can organize and solidify their story or argument. As students read through with fresh eyes, encourage them to make comments in the margins that add detail, or ask questions with answers that they can incorporate into their rewrite. As you teach students how to move through different stages of drafting, from rough to final, call their attention to the different kinds of revisions that are made. These changes take place as they move from Global (organization, structure, voice) to Local (sentence fluency, conventions) revision strategies, and learn how to give and receive peer feedback (Deborah Dean, Strategic Writing). Different marks (ex: circling, underlining, highlighting) can help students keep track of ideas moving throughout the text, identify elements specific to the assignment, and interpret feedback (as well as show "proof" of revision).

An Author's review of Grammarly

via Katie Rose

Using SpellCheck, Grammarly, or another surface-level editing program can be helpful in making sure that more common mistakes are corrected, but alone they are not really sufficient revision tools for our students. Encouraging students to have someone else read through their paper, and reading it out loud will bring up different errors and help students talk through solutions. (Shout-out to my sister for always reading through mine!) Responses to my questions for the Hyde Park MS students in my previous post showed that the students realized that using several revision tools was more effective. Often you will apply different tools at different stages in your writing, and it will change how you see your progress.

The dreaded red squiggly line

The stages of drafting are called a lot of different things: brainstorming, outlining, rough draft, second draft, clean draft, final draft; to name a few.
There is no standard number of drafts that a piece might go through before it's ready to be published, but between each one comes a period of revision that's necessary for the piece to progress. 
          To end on a more lighthearted note, it's important to realize that there are many ways to approach and solve a problem, make changes, or rewrite a paper. In this image, fictional character Tom Riddle attempts to make anagrams out of his name. We can see that some of the phrases he came up with are better than others, but all fulfill the purpose of an anagram (for him: to include the letters of his name, for us: to be entertained). Certain words continue to appear throughout his attempts, and he takes notes and draws pictures in the margins that can help illustrate the text, or at least his feelings about the text. He starred one attempt that he felt showed promise, but his final decision is circled at the bottom, with an annotation next to it: COOL. While we hope our students have deeper and more relevant comments about their own drafts, it's good to acknowledge drafting and revision of all shapes and sizes.