Question

Patricia T. O’Connor says, “All writing begins life as a first draft, and first drafts are never any good. They are not supposed to be.” Is this claim true? Why or why not? What do you hope to accomplish with a first draft? How can you make drafting more effective?

Answer 1

Patricia T. O' Conner is a former editor with the New York Times. She wrote a couple of books on how to write. In her book Gramphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English she mentioned wrote the lines in the question. She said that every piece of writing would become a masterpiece only after multiple iterations to check for the spelling, grammar, sentence construction, verb-tense case etc. She mentioned that all the writing begins as a first draft, and that first drafts were never intent to be good.

The first draft is the first copy or the first piece of writing that a writer would churn out. After writing the first draft, the same should be revisited multiple times to check for spelling, idioms, sentences and trimmed into a better one. After two or three iterations, the copy would come as clean and good to go for publication.