A draft is a version of a piece of writing that is not yet finished — a stage in the composing process between initial generation and final text. Drafting is the act of producing that version.
The concept of the draft encodes an important insight about writing: good prose is not produced in a single pass. Linda Flower and John Hayes’s cognitive process model showed that composing involves recursive interaction among planning, translating (putting ideas into language), and reviewing — and that these processes don’t happen in a fixed sequence [@flowerhayes1981]. A writer plans, writes, reads what they’ve written, re-plans, and writes again. The draft is the artifact of one pass through this cycle.
Different drafts serve different purposes:
- The first draft (or rough draft, or discovery draft) gets material on the page. Its function is generation, not quality. Peter Elbow and freewriting practitioners treat the first draft as writer-based prose: organized around the writer’s thinking process, not the reader’s needs [@elbow1973].
- Subsequent drafts reorganize for the reader: restructuring, cutting, adding evidence, clarifying argument. This is where revision happens — not at the sentence level (that comes later) but at the structural level.
- The final draft addresses sentence-level concerns: diction, syntax, consistency, proofreading. Editing for polish before the structure is right wastes effort on sentences that may be cut.
The common mistake is trying to produce the final draft first — composing and editing simultaneously. This produces neither fluency nor quality, because the generative process (which needs freedom) and the evaluative process (which needs judgment) interfere with each other.
Related terms
- revision — the process of transforming one draft into the next
- freewriting — a method for producing first-draft material quickly
- writer-based prose — what first drafts naturally produce
- voice — voice often emerges through multiple drafts as the writer discovers what they’re saying