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Paper #2: Draft
DeadlineApril 10, class time. No extensions. GuidelinesThe draft is 7-8 pages, presenting the main ideas & sources of your project. Use MLA internal notation, and you must cite you sources. Drafting ProcessPerhaps the first place to begin when writing the draft is to go back to the proposal. What comments did you receive in peer review? Note: See also pages 13 - 23 of your Writer's Reference for some ideas on drafting. For more ideas on drafting, consider John McPhee's process. His writing teacher in high school assigned three compositions a week, with an outline of its beginning, middle and end. His process of writing, as is his style, is taut, ordered, and disciplined. He gathers material from the people he interviews, or from research. He says he goes into the process with no preconceptions, preferring his mind to be as blank as the page. After he has taken notes, he retypes them, which gives him ideas about phrasing, order, analogies. It also lets him know what he needs to go back over or do more research on.He writes the "lead" first, a journalism term. Then, he writes the rest of the topics on index cards, so he can see the possibilities of order and shuffle the cards. He tacks them on the wall so he can get a broad view. Then, he goes to the corresponding notes, cuts those up, and sorts them in some order and puts them in a file folder. He has a dart that he tacks up under the card he is working on. You might conduct a similar process with your annotations. Group them into topics, then decide on the order of those topics (parts), and them determine how they'll fit into a larger whole. He’s a craftsmen, and understands that the work must have a form (he once wrote a book about making a birchbark canoe). When McPhee writes a first draft, he spends twelve hour stints in his office, concentrating and distilling his research into prose. |
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