Screwing up a single draft

In “Composing Behaviors of One- and Multi-Draft Writers” Muriel Harris talks about multi- and one-draft writers. I've had a lot of thoughts about the implications of this piece. I'm trying to be more open-minded about the idea of starting with clear ideas in mind. I've tended to see these as bad. It's limiting and boring...the writing process is just like filling out a form. But I'm trying to understand that it works for some people. But certainly not everyone.

Failed writing can come from bad single drafting or bad multi-drafting. There's the kind that start with a thesis and don't get anywhere, and the kind that just start off writing and don't get anywhere.

Maybe it's just because I don't understand them, but I find it much harder to fix an essay that was constructed purely with the five-paragraph model in mind than one that starts out just writing. Starting with the thesis, for inexperienced writers, can get you off track fast. They frequently choose entirely too broad a topic, then divide it into three unmanageable subpoints which they treat very generally. These writers need to do more "invention" to fix their papers--something they don't want to do after they've finished the draft. They have to come up with more to say about a narrower topic. Revision means starting over, in a sense.

I see a lot of papers in the writing center that have the opposite problem. They start writing without a thesis and don't quite find one. This is usually easy to fix. Figure out your thesis--every paper has a point, even if you didn't explicitly state it at the end of your introduction. What are you trying to get across to your readers? Read each paragraph and figure out how it relates to your thesis. Why did you include this paragraph? Add a topic sentence to tie the paragraph explicitly to the thesis, or cut the paragraph altogether.

Now maybe this is just me. Maybe I find it easier to help students do what I already do myself. But it's not like I never start with a thesis and subpoints. Frequently I do, I'm just not tied to them. And I usually get there after a little preliminary freewriting. It just seems like it's a lot farther from done when you screw it up that way.