In the article “Shitty First Drafts,” By Anne Lamott, she lets out the long held secret to good writing, there is never a good first run on a paper. It 's always starts off as a torrent of ideas unfiltered, ideas completely let loose. It is the draft that is never shown to anyone, the draft that holds all the dirty little thought that you have on a topic, and all the information that you may use later on. It does not matter if the draft is ten pages long filled with unreadable text in the end the good stuff you use could only fill up three pages. It good to finally read what I have been thinking on for years. The first draft is a rant. Next draft is a cleaner version of the first. Last draft is the closest thing to perfection as possible. …show more content…
The point is just to let the unrestricted thoughts flow, for me most of the time it ends up being a rant that makes me look like a less than nice guy. To prove my point in the third essay for the class titled “Writing for all” the first draft was a total rant. The they say a portion of the essay had lines like “ A student would go to class, learn “... drop the E and add -ing” to make something a verb. Only to later down the line learn, doto some detail, it doesn’t always count as a verb.” making me sound pessimistic. Not something I generally would allow people to read. After a combing through the rant filled pages of that first draft I managed to salvage I created this as the better opening “A scholar may use writing as a way for us to preserve what we learned, for future generations to build off of. A book author will use writing to pull people into the book’s world of mythos and legend.” The First draft had essayed gold mired in the rant somewhere and just took rereading and picking out those lumps of gold. Which then have the opportunity to be part of the main essay after smelting or filtering it …show more content…
Between the torrent of unusable ideas and the gold there is at least one more filter that helps pick the best nuggets of written words from that first draft. The draft in between the first and final product help chooses the best possible works to display. In the first essay about “What Are You Buying When You Buy Organic?” by Steven Shapin, my initial draft after my first held about ten ideas ranging from good topic like the cost of transport of foods to less great thing like the special conditions needed to make food one hundred percent organic, later I realised there was not much in this so I left it, then decided just to take the few golden parts of that essay to craft the final version of my Essay. For Example, I filtered out ideas that did not work with the point I was trying to make in the essay, such as the shipping of jobs overseas and the idea of a lazy American. That idea would have weakened my over essay and detracted from the primary topic of the essay, so the second draft helped me filter out all that unnecessary fluff. This is also where we tend to add supporting examples for the ideas placing in out evidence to the ideas we have picked out and chooosen to use. In the same essay about organic being sold organic food, “The organic food always seems to have their own sealed packaging with lots of earthy shades of greens and purples. Pictures printed
“Unteaching the Five Paragraph Essay” by Marie Foley demonstrates how a five paragraph essay formula disturbs the thought process of the students and limits what they can write. A five paragraph essay is an introduction with the main idea, with three supporting topics showing the relationship to the main idea, and a conclusion summarizing the entire essay. Foley argues that this formula forces students to fill in the blank and meet a certain a word limit. She noted that this formula was intended for teachers in the education system to teach an overcrowded class how to write. While it is beneficial for the first-time students learning how to write. In the long run, this standard destroys any free style writing, new connections between a topic,
An article that uses a lot of rhetorical devices is Shitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott. The speaker of this article is obviously Anne Lamott; the reader gets to understand her more after she shares some personal experiences. Lamott wants people to know that their first drafts are supposed to be shitty. This article is meant for college students who just finished their first draft and is looking for improvement. The purpose of this whole article is to inform you that your first draft is supposed to be horrible because no one can just pull an amazing paper from no where, not even the people who write for a living. The whole subject is telling you that your first drafts are going to be bad, so make sure to write multiple drafts before you
However, though John Warner’s argument is strong, Kerri smith’s argument is stronger. In Kerri Smith’s article “In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay,” She claims that the five-paragraph essay should stay taught in schools as a guideline for a well-structured essay. She explains the five-paragraph essay as an “introduce-develop-conclude structure” that even great expository writing follows this structure (Smith 16). She purposefully communicates to her audience this idea to show that this structure gives students the knowledge and capability to write a professional essay. The five-paragraph essay includes the three key points to have a well-structured and organized essay. By mentioning that other great writers use this form of structure, she creates a stronger argument as to why the five-paragraph essay is important to education. She continues her article by explaining her early stages of writing and how she was taught; over time, her teachers would show her new ways to improve her writing which, in the end, she was told to think “of those five paragraphs simply as a mode of organization” (Smith
Both of the articles “Dancing with Professors” by Patricia Limerick and “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott resolve the issues faced by college students when writing papers. The first article, “Dancing with Professors,” explains why college professors expect more elaborate papers even though they assign dull and un-motivational reading to their students. On the other end of the writing spectrum, “Shitty First Drafts” explains how valuable the first draft is to students, and why students should not feel weary about writing them.
She starts off by telling readers of her position in writing food reviews for the California Magazine. Next, she begins to explain the steps she took in writing one of these reviews. First she would go to one of the restaurants, not only once but a numerous amount of times. Along with her she would bring a team of opinionated friends who would help her to freely express what she was trying to purpose to readers. After a few days she would sit down to her desk and begin her journey in trying to write her first draft. Through this process she would stumble and struggle with finding the perfect way to compose her review. Lamotts last thought in this paragraph is one that should help but writers to ease, no matter how "shitty" your first draft is, it's quite alright because no one is going to read it
In Milo B. Beckman’s article “Why I Write Bad” he talks about how college students are not taking their college writing serious enough. They are merely going through the motions of writing out a “formula” of what they think the professor wants to read and then adding that extra fluff to make it look pretty on the outside but not have a lot of substance on the inside when you actually go into it and analysis what the essay is really saying. For Beckman to get his main message across to his readers he uses his experience as a student and his vast knowledge of his audience to convey to them of the importance of actual good writing through his diction and appealing to their need for success.
The writing process is always taught as a set way of doing things when, in fact, it is a process that requires personal methods that work for each individual person. It is a necessary lesson to teach in school but there should not be so much emphasis on following the exact way that is taught. It is a contrived process that was probably created by a group of scholars who didn’t even follow these exact rules. If anything, they all did variations of the ideas and then met in the middle with what should be taught. I am in no way saying that the guidelines are wrong but they need to be exactly that, guidelines, instead of a rut that students get stuck in.
What Anne Lamott is trying to convey in this excerpt is that every writer writes a bad first draft. No one can sit down and write the best novel, essay, etc. The objective of this passage is trying to convince people that it’s okay to not know exactly what you’re going to write, or everyone really does write first “shitty drafts”. People who write for a living don’t feel one hundred percent about their writing. They don’t sit down every day and know exactly what they are going to do. There is a process to their madness and having a bad first draft is going to be one of them. Lamott discusses that her own writing has terrible first drafts and sometimes looks nothing like the finish product. She talks about how she wrote a food review for a newspaper. She started off writing the meat of the review. She then went back and wrote down even more and more until she was finished. This is her way to persuade the readers. Basically, Lamott is trying to go against popular belief about writers and that they don’t have first drafts and know exactly what they are going to write. I do believe what she is saying. It is impossible to just sit down and write
Writing requires a delicate balance between pleasing an audience, yet finding and sticking true to personal perspectives. More often than not, people find themselves ignoring their own thoughts and desires and just following along with the crowd, not standing up and arguing for anything, leaving behind a wishy-washy essay because they are too scared to stray from the obligations to others before the obligation to themselves. Anne Lamott’s “The Crummy First Draft” and Koji Frahm’s “How To Write an A Paper” both evaluate and stress the importance to find your own voice in writing and to be more critical towards readers. The reader’s perspective needs to play a role in writing, but it should not overrule the writer themselves. Writing needs to
We would do research on a subject or a person, and write about them. We, once again, were not allowed to be unique in our writing or think creatively or critically. This is the time when I was taught the five paragraph essay. As stated in Gray’s article, the five paragraph essay is detrimental to students’ writing. This format for writing is damaging because it doesn’t allow students to express their own ideas about a topic. It does not allow for any creativity or uniqueness in a paper. In tenth grade, I wrote many papers for my English class, but I never once got an A on them. I was led to believe that my writing was weak because I could not relate to what I was writing about. I did not have any emotional connection to the research papers I had to write, and it made it harder for me to write them. I had grown up not being allowed to think critically, and therefore, my papers in high school lacked creativity and deeper
In her article “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lamott creates an argument attempting to prove to her readers that every good writer begins with a “shitty” first draft. This is a very bold claim to make about writers, and obviously should have some solid evidence to back it up. However, contrary to what one might think, Lamott has little to no “real” evidence to support her statements. Instead, she uses humor and sarcasm to cover the fact that she has no real support for her views. By doing this, Lamott lacks much of the credibility (usually) needed in a rhetorical argument, and her humorous tone does not suffice for a convincing argument. Even though Lamott incorporates a great deal of sarcasm and absurdity in her work, she lacks the most important
In our modern society, we have forgotten the art of writing. When we write, we think to ourselves, the longer the sentence, the more intelligent I will sound. Many may say it is by writing long sentences. But is it all that true? In this piece of writing I would like to focus on an essay written by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing. In this essay he explains how and why when we write, we should keep our sentences short. he also explains why students should be assigned essays that are not determinate on other sources as evidence. I will also be comparing this to a piece written by Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness. I will be comparing these two pieces on their writing style, and their essayistic ideas. My belief is that we need
This article “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott help me understand that every good writer struggle to write their first draft and it might not be perfect at first but with a lot of dedication and effort everything could be done as expected. know that even the best published book started out with “Shitty First Drafts” help me to not be too critical to my first draft and having a little bit more confidences about my writing. I would apply this lesson whenever I have a writing assignment and I am get frustrated on how to start my essay, I would remember that all writers went through this stage of anxiety and not comfortable about their first draft. I would definitely recommend this article to a student that is starting their first composition
However, when it came time to write the essay, I was confronted with my old enemy, writing. Writing and I have a history, I have never enjoyed being in the presence of writing, due to its both mentally and physically taxing requirements. Despite our deeply rooted feud, there are times where I cannot simply dismiss writing, and generally with help such as guided activities, exemplars, and therapy; Writing and I can put aside our differences for a brief moment of time. One example of this is in my argument, In the beginning sentence I feel that I was able to reach what was expected of me by created a strong counter argument and quickly proving it wrong: “Some might argue that if an individual has grown fond of an illusion, then why wake them from that joy? Now, that is a fair point, but as we see in the book, if they wake up, they realize how unhappy they truly are.” As I face more and more of these assignments where I am forced to implement writing, I grow more accustomed to the process. Writing might not be my ideal major, but I understand its importance. While I dread typing a 5 page essays, I know they are coming. Better I struggle know and learn than struggle later and
All through our academic years we were taught how to write. Starting with elementary, when the form of writing was first introduced, it consisted of compositions with simple prompts about our weekends. Now, that there was an idea of how to write, middle school English teachers began teaching students a writing format. This format is commonly known as the five-paragraph essay, which entailed an introduction, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The five-paragraph essay began being strongly implemented in high school and it leads to many debates whether or not it benefited students proceeding into college. I believe the five-paragraph format was helpful for high school students starting out, but is not as beneficial to freshman