Overcoming the "Perfect First Draft" Trap Through Human Dialogue

The perfect first draft is a myth that costs scholarly authors months, sometimes years, and occasionally the manuscript itself. It is the belief — held with varying degrees of consciousness, but held widely — that the words going onto the page should be close to final, that a sentence not worth keeping is a sentence not worth writing, and that the draft should look, at every stage of its production, like something a committee member would read without embarrassment.

The belief produces paralysis. Or it produces prose so tightly controlled at the sentence level that the argument never had room to develop. Take the author who spends forty-five minutes on a single paragraph in the introduction. Her introduction is no better for it. She has one paragraph, and the time that should have gone to chapters two through five went into getting that paragraph right at a stage when she does not yet know what the argument is going to require.

Drafting and revising are different cognitive activities, and collapsing them into a single pass serves both poorly. Drafting is generative. Its job is to get the thinking onto the page in a form that can be worked with, so it should be fast, permissive, and tolerant of imprecision. The draft that comes out of good drafting is complete and rough: it contains the argument, however crudely, and it gives the revision process something to work on. The authors who finish strong manuscripts draft them fully first and revise them honestly afterward.

Revision is where the precision comes in. The author reads what she wrote with the cold eye of someone encountering the argument for the first time and asks, at every paragraph, whether the prose is actually doing what she intended. Alone, this is hard. She knows what she meant, and that knowledge fills in the gaps between what is on the page and what should be there. She reads the sentence she intended to write rather than the sentence she wrote.

At the revision stage, a second reader sees the manuscript as it actually stands. A skilled editor brings the innocent eye that the author cannot have for her own work, along with the disciplinary awareness to understand what the argument is trying to do and the editorial judgment to identify where the prose falls short of it.