Shitty First Drafts

In Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts”, I noticed that a lot of the steps she took were things that I fear doing in my own writing. It is extremely difficult for me to delete words that I have generated even if I know that they are not beneficial to my argument. The process of writing whatever comes to mind down is a process that I wish to be able to achieve. I believe that her point of getting words down on the page is a very important step to creating a well written final draft. I was surprised by how many writers all have this same exact problem. The first draft of any writing seems to be a universally difficult task.

Revision Plan 

My goal is to connect my body paragraphs to my thesis in a more organized and coherent manner. I want to clearly state what I will be discussing through my essay and how each point connects to my thesis.

Some steps that I will take to reach this goal are..

  • Create a more narrow thesis relating to the cultural and societal aspects of dealing with a medical metaphor.
  • Focus on 3 or 4 main examples of cultural and social effects.
  • Connect a personal experience to my thesis
  • Use quotes that relate to culture and society rather than broad quotes related to metaphor in general.

My biggest challenge in achieving this goal is to focus on staying specific and not opening up the discussion to a broad place surrounding only metaphor. In this essay it is very easy to resort back to defining what a metaphor is or explaining how Geary, Khullar, and Erard use metaphor differently. Staying on task to explain my view of metaphors in the medical field will be something to really strive for.

If this becomes a challenge for me I will use different resources to stay away from being too broad. The first thing I will do is personally go through my paper to make sure that the quotes and examples I used relate to the social and cultural aspect of metaphors. If I come across this issue another resource I can use is asking a peer or student at SASC to read over my paper and explain to me in their own words what they believe my thesis and paragraphs are really focused on.