The Summary and What to Take With of Two Passages
The essay, “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott is basically
an informational piece about what you should be thinking in your first draft.
The first draft isn’t about getting to perfection, rather tackling the
objective of writing itself. This draft is more of an ease into the activity of
your paper and not as daunting as just doing the paper flat out on the first
sitting. All you really want in the first draft is to be descriptive, and break
the ice of the paper.
In Richard Straub’s “Responding - Really Responding - to Other
Students’ Writing,” is about what it says, responding to someone’s paper. When
judging a first draft of a paper, compliment people once, for each critique you
give them. Also when judging a paper, don’t judge it with the author in mind,
because no one gets better when you let things slide because of how your
opinion of that person is. You should always judge a paper equally, and as if
you were talking to the person in person and not as a teacher would.
After reading both of these passages, I can take two main
things from them. Don’t dive into projects, but take them by steps, and don’t
let things slide just because you know who they are. If I do these, I can use
them to tackle difficult tasks easier, and give everybody fair and equal
opportunities.
The
biggest quote I get from Lamott’s essay is, “Now, practically even better news
than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good
writers write them.” This tells me that it’s ok to fail and that I shouldn’t
expect perfection from myself right out of the gates in anything because even
the best people at things take perfection in steps and not dives.
The
quote that spoke out to me in Straub’s piece is, “Try to focus your comments on
a couple of areas of writing.” This quote can relate to anything that combines
multiple things together. For instance driving, you need to teach someone how
to start a car with a clutch before you can actually teach them to drive. I can
relate that to writing because there are many steps that I can focus on one at
a time to get better at writing.
Sources:
Richard Straub's piece:
http://www.loribethdehertogh.com/101/Spring13/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Responding-Student-Writing.pdf
Anne Lamott's piece:
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/english/wwwroot2/ta/hyperteach/pdfs/shitty.pdf
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