Lamott's Essay On First Drafts

Lamott uses her personal example to demonstrate how she was truly incapable of writing a perfect paper for her assignment, describing in full detail how she would pause from writer’s block, eventually write something terrible, and then immediately erase everything and begin anew (94). She appears to represent her dilemma as the struggle that all writers, especially students, face when they have to write a good paper and submit it before a certain deadline; she also refutes the claim that expert are always perfect writers who make beautiful first drafts, stating that they also face these challenges and that they are not exempt from having flaws in their works (93). She then provides some immensely helpful advice on writing first drafts, which …show more content…
They are usually timed for only a portion of the class, and although the papers that the students write look like their first drafts, the classes normally move on to the next writing prompt. This means that they are not able to write a better second draft based on their last prompt, and they can only rely on the comments that their teacher gives them to find out how they can improve the quality of their papers. Therefore, the timed writing assignments of high school classes are not technically first draft writing assignments, but rather final draft assignments. While college courses have these timed essays as well, the big difference is that they do not count towards a large percentage of the overall grade. My English Literature and Composition course, for example, assigns a fifteen minute essay for every day in class, and that means that failing one of them will not likely result in failing the class. High school classes, on the other hand, have fewer timed papers and more additional assignments, thereby increasing the risk of damaging a student’s grade if he or she fails to write a good response under a short amount of