Journal 3

In “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lamott describes the beginning of her writing process and what she does to get started when writing an article or paper. When I’m first writing a first draft of the paper, I feel like I go through many of the same things. When I first sit down to write my first draft, for me the hardest part is getting started. I will usually sit there just thinking about how to start off my paper. Eventually I’ll write something down, but after looking at what I just wrote for a few seconds, I usually erase it and start completely over. For example, when writing this journal entry, I completely re-wrote the first sentence twice after analyzing my first two sentences, and I had a similar experience when writing my narrative. But usually after that, like Anne, I take a quick break. Once I have an intro I like written down, the rest of the paper seems to come easy, even if it isn’t really that great. When writing my narrative, getting started and writing the intro paragraph was probably the hardest part because in the intro you’re supposed to give the basic idea of your paper and basically summarize it. In the body paragraphs, you’re then supposed to explain in detail what you wrote in your opening paragraph. Once I wrote the opening paragraph to my narrative, I used my outline and wrote about three pages worth of my paper without stopping for any breaks because it just felt so much easier after getting over that first “bump.”

After thinking about what Anne wrote, I feel like writing a rough draft first is really the best way to begin writing a paper. In high school, when writing a paper, I would almost always write my paper all at once, usually in one sitting. As I was writing, I would look over what I typed as I was writing the paper and correct anything I wanted to change right there. Once I finished the paper, I would look over it once to see if there were any spelling or grammar mistakes and then I would be finished. The problem when doing this is that, for me, it would take me a really long time since I am figuring out what to writing and also making sure the paper is good enough to be handed in. Basically, I would be writing a rough draft and a final draft all at once. Starting out by writing a rough draft is much smarter. For me, the point in writing a rough draft is getting all of my ideas down, which is the hardest part of writing a paper. After I have all of the information I need to write the paper down, I just need to reorganize it and put it in to better words to make it presentable. As I finished writing the rough draft for my personal narrative, I thought to myself “it’s not really that great, but at least I have all of my ideas down.” The thing is, it’s not supposed to be ready to be handed in, it’s just supposed to be a start on my paper.