Drafts
At the start, the drafts seemed tedious to me, an exercise in producing quantity rather than quality. This feeling persisted throughout the semester and for most of the class I failed to see the point of writing such an abundance of paragraphs. It occurred to me a few times that there was some purpose to the task that yet escaped me. Nevertheless, throughout writing the drafts I never felt that they had any point. Both the act of writing and the product had no meaning to me as the drafts were just reworded fragments of my notes. However, in hindsight it occurs to me that the function of the drafts was just that, to produce quantity and not quality. In having to write so much, I eventually achieved a point where these rough paragraphs simply flowed onto the page and, very unusually, I wasn’t editing my sentences as I was writing them. I now realise that it wasn’t about the content but about the process. Thus, although the act of writing the drafts never seemed to have a point to me, they have fundamentally changed how I write and how I approached this course’s projects.
Perfect Paragraphs
At the beginning of the semester, much like the drafts, the perfect paragraphs seemed an exercise in tediousness. Having to edit one of my drafts every week seemed pointless to me, and this feeling remained throughout most of the semester. While I was writing the perfect paragraphs I didn’t feel like I was improving my writing in any way, and the products of my efforts meant nothing to me. I never spent time thinking about the purpose of the perfect paragraphs, they were just another task I had to complete every week. However, upon reflection, I realise that in making the perfect paragraphs I edited my drafts a lot more than I usually edit my writing. Before this class, I used to edit my writing immediately after having finished an assignment. In doing the perfect paragraphs I was often forced to edit my drafts several days later. As such, I was editing my drafts with a fresh perspective that wasn’t as affected by what I was trying to say in my draft but rather by how the message of the draft actually came across to the reader. In sum, even though the purpose of the perfect paragraphs was not immediately obvious to me, they have changed how I edit my writing.
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