Introduction to Composing as a Process
When writing, you won’t immediately end up with a finished product. Like many other skills, it’s something that takes a lot of time and practice. Great writers have to plan, draft, and edit their work before completing it. Sometimes, new and better ideas can appear as one goes through this process. If you want to have a good written piece of work, then this writing process must be done.
Freewriting
Freewriting is an exercise of writing anything and everything that comes to mind. This allows you be less fearful of writing because you start writing without worrying about filtering your thoughts, correcting grammar mistakes, and fixing spelling errors. It helps you to bring out your own unique voice, which is something that gets warped if you simultaneously write and edit. Freewriting may sound crazy, but it’s a very useful exercise that makes your writing better.
Shitty First Drafts
As mentioned in the introduction, writing is a process. It starts with writing a “child’s draft,” which consists of a gigantic mess of thoughts that no one will ever see. Writing a second draft is next, where you begin to edit the first draft, fixing anything that looks off. The third draft comes last, and this is where you look closely to see if you’ve missed any uncorrected mistakes. Writing drafts is essential to having a good piece of writing, and it’s completely fine to make a thousand mistakes before having your final product.
Response
In order to write well, everyone has to start with writing drafts. The “child’s draft” is like a freewriting exercise on a specific topic. The editing comes later, in the second and third drafts. After knowing that the first draft can be a complete disarray of multiple ideas, I feel less afraid of writing. As someone who attempts to write and edit in one go while panicking over how terrible the sentences are, writing drafts will definitely be beneficial to me.