Draft without Editing

Hate to write? Welcome to the club.

Writing letters, memos, and reports is hard work, and even many pros dread the laborious process of getting words on paper or computer screen. But writing can be easier. The secret is to do it wrong the first time.

In a business environment that worships quality, that advice may seem sacrilegious. At IBM, for example, posters on the walls explicitly proclaim “Do It Right the First Time.” But consider: when IBM engineers develop a new computer, they don’t worry about making the first one perfect, as if they were going to sell it to a customer. The first one or two—probably even the first one or two dozen—are prototypes, built for testing and refining. Building and testing these imperfect prototypes is an important step in finally “doing it right.”

That’s not how most of us write, however. We try to skip the prototype stage and go right to the final product. Most of us edit carefully as we write, pausing every few words to check spelling or punctuation or grammar.

For most of us, that habit began in elementary school, when “rewriting” was a bad word, something we had to do when we didn’t write well enough at first, something that kept us in from recess. By high school or college, many of us had learned to compose at the typewriter, making up the final copy as we went along. In the days before computers and correcting typewriters, many of us found that when we mistyped the first letter of a word, it was easier to think of a synonym than to erase and retype. We were determined to get it right the first time.

We were like the medieval monk in the Jim Unger cartoon who has spent perhaps a week drawing a beautiful illuminated letter “B” in the upper left corner of his parchment. He calls to his brother monk across the room, “Hey! Is there another word for ‘Verily’ that starts with a ‘B’?”

In the long run, stopping to edit while we draft breaks our train of thought and keeps us from being as smart or creative as we could be. Moreover, it commits us to the illusion of perfection much too early, keeping us from doing the later revision that could help our writing get its job done better. In the long run, getting it right the first time keeps us from communicating as effectively as we could. Our careers suffer.

The solution: “quick and dirty” drafting, drafting done without the interruptions of editing. Give it a try right now. Get out a paper and pen, or start up your word processing program. Then write for ten minutes, as fast as you physically can, literally without stopping. Don’t stop to think of what to say (just say, “I don’t know what to write, I don’t know what to write . . . .” until you think of what to write); don’t stop to read what you’ve written; don’t stop to worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar; don’t stop to change anything. (Hint: if you’re writing at a computer, turn off the monitor—or turn down its brightness.)

At the end of ten minutes you may not have Pulitzer-Prize-winning prose, but you’ll have more than you’ve ever written in ten minutes. And more important, you’ll have learned what it feels like to write without the interference of editing.

In a real situation, of course, you will have prepared for this quick and dirty draft by asking some important questions about your reader, purpose, subject matter, and organization. In short, you will have done the planning recommended so far in this book. But even in a real situation, you can then draft virtually without stopping. If you don’t know how to spell a word, just approximate; you or your spell-checker can fix it later. If you don’t know which of two words to use, use them both; you can decide when you look at your draft again. For now, just get comfortable with doing it wrong the first time.

Bradley S. Hayden of Western Michigan University has said that “drafts are like newly born children: We can’t expect them to go to graduate school when they are only a few days old. The most important thing is for them to have arrived into the world safely.”

Ken Blanchard and Robert Lorber wrote in Putting the One Minute Manager to Work, “Anything worth doing does not have to be done perfectly—at first.” Or as William Faulkner put it, “Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.”

Read related posts:

1. Chapter 12: Manage Your Writing Take Charge of Your Writing Process In a cartoon I...
2. Chapter 9: Pay by the Word Make Your Sentences Economical Norman R. Augustine, president and CEO...
3. Chapter 6: Take a Break and Change Hats Get a Fresh View of Your Writing Perhaps the most...
4. Chapter 11: Finish the Job Check Your Spelling, Punctuation, and Mechanics What are your biggest...
5. Chapter 12: Manage Your Writing (again) Take Charge of Your Writing Process Good managers know the...