Rough Draft
Rough Drafts are tricky. They are supposed to be more fleshed out than an outline, but less refined than your final draft. The idea is that you write a first draft of your paper, and then edit, edit, edit. Last semester in seminar, we had to write rough drafts and then bring them to the next class for peer editing. I never found the peer editing sessions particularly helpful. No one was that critical- most people would list a lot of things that were done well, correct some grammar mistakes, and then add one or two things you could tweak. And that worked out fairly well, I guess, since I usually got pretty good grades on my papers. But I always wanted something a little more. It doesn’t feel great to hear that you’ve done something incorrectly, but I would rather someone tell me when I can improve on my writing- not only for that specific paper, but so I will know for future writing as well. In general, I think that rough drafts are important, but I wish the editing process (at least at Parsons) was a little more thorough.
