Brian Miller
Eng. 105
Respond to Anne Lamott's essay
1/20/08
In reading Anne Lamott’s essay on rough drafts, I have found some differences and similarities with my own. She talked about her brain being overloaded with ideas, but couldn’t sort them out and make her first draft seem good enough. She talked about how she wasn’t quite able to get the perfect opening paragraph to be riveting enough to grab her reader’s attention for her food reviews. By reading her essay, I was able to identify my writing process more clearly and be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of it.

The first strength I saw with my writing style was that I get everything down on paper, not really caring about how it looks. As Anne said in her essay, it is better to just throw everything down on paper and worry about the details later, because if you try and make it perfect in the beginning, you might lose an important idea or concept for whatever you are writing. The trick to the first draft is to not care about it. You need to be able to see it as a big list of everything that is in your head that you want to put into your writing. Kids in grade school were taught to do that using other methods, like brainstorming with other kids, writing a list down, making bubble charts, and so on. All of those methods are the first draft of a writing piece.

A definite weakness I saw after reading Anne’s essay was my laziness in proofreading and making corrections as I write my first draft. I don’t like to take the time to read over my work. I think it’s tedious and a daunting task, so I read my work as a write and make edits to where I think they are necessary. I would rather have someone else review my work and give me suggestions on what paragraphs need to be fixed, or what words are misspelled, or if my topic and conclusion sentences are choppy, or anything like that. But if I can’t find anyone to help me with it, then I just make corrections as a write. But if I can find someone, to look over it and give me suggestions, then I will take the time to go over it.

I don’t think blogging will affect my writing at all. It’s just a different method of submitting my homework to my teacher. It makes it easier and my teacher to collect, look at, and grade, and easier on the students to turn in. My teacher doesn’t have to worry about keeping track of papers, and the students don’t have to worry about turning in a hard copy or forgetting to grab it off the printer and bringing it to class.