104 105

104 OTHER IMPORTANT FACTORS IN WRITING

The Third Stage: An Initial Draft

Working in an apple plant was the worst job I ever had. The work was physically hard. For a long time ten hours a night, I stacked cartons in a tractor trailer. The cartons rolled down a metal track. Each carton was vory -hoavy Eaoh carton -was heavy with with cane or bottlos of applo juiee Each carton contained twelve thirty-two-ounce cans or bottles ot apple juice, and they were heavy. At the same-timo, I had to koop a montal couat of all tho -eortono I-had łeodod. The pay for the job was another bad feature. I was getting the minimum wagę at that time plus a nickel extra for night shift. I wotked -long-hours-o ver sixty hours a week. I still did not take home much meRoy morę than one hundred dollars. Working conditions were poor at the plant. During work we were limited to ohort breaks two ten-minute breaks and unpaid lunch. . . . The truck-loading dock had zero temperatures. . .. Lonely on the job . . . no interests with other loaders . . worked by myself at the end of the shift.. . cleaned up the apple vats.

Comments and Activity

i*

Fili In the missing words: At this stage, Gene has enough details to write the initial draft of his paper. Notice that he continues to accumulate specific supporting details as he writes the draft. For example, he crosses out and replaces “long

hours” with the morę specific _; he crosses out and replaces

“short breaks” with the morę specific__He also works to improve

some of his sentences (for instance, he writes three different versions of the

_ sentence in the paragraph). In addition, he crosses out and

eliminates a sentence about a_, because he realizes it does not

deve!op his first supporting point that the work was physically hard.

Toward the end of the paper, Gene either can’t find the right words to say what he wants to say or he doesn’t quite know yet what he wants to say. So he freewrites (shown by the ellipses . . .), putting down on paper all the impressions

that come into his head. He knows that the technique of_may

help him move closer to the right thought and the right words.

In a second and third draft, Gene continues to work on and improve his paper. He then proofreads carefully his next-to-final draft, and the result is the finał draft that follows.

The Łast Stage: The Finał Draft

My Apple Plant Job

Working in an apple plant was the worst job I ever had. First of all, the work was physically hard. For ten hours a night, I took cartons that rolled down a metal track and stacked them onto wooden skids in a tractor trailor. Each carton cońtained twelve thirty-two-ounce cans or bottles of apple juice, and they were heavy, The second bad feature of the job was the pay, I was getting the minimum wagę at that time. two dollars an hour, plus the minimum of a nickel extra for working the night shift. Even after working over sixty hours a week. I still did not take home much morę than one hundred dollars. The worst feature of the apple plant job was the working conditions. During work we were limited to two ten-minute breaks and an unpaid half hour for lunch. Most of my time was spent outside on the truck-loading dock in near-zero-degree temperatures. And I was very lonely on the job, sińce I had no interests in common with the other truck loaders. I felt this isolation especially when the production linę shut down for the night, and I worked by myself for two hours cleaning the apple vats. The vats were an ugly place to be on a cold morning, and the job was a bitter one to have.

Comments and Activity

Fili in the missing words: Notice the many improvements that Gene has madę as a result of his second and third drafts. He has added transitional words that mark clearly the three supporting points of his paper. The transitional words are

“first of all,” -, and--He has sharpened his

details, improved the phrasing of his sentences, and found the words needed to complete the last section of his paper. He has also proofread his paper carefully, checkirlg the spelling of words he was unsure about and correcting several sentence-skills mistakes.

Almost every effective writer, like Gene, is engaged in a continuing process of moving toward a completely realized paper. The finał version is seldom, almost never, attained all at once. instead, it is the end result of a series of

--All too often, people stop writing when they are only part way

through the writing process; they tum in a paper that is really only an eariy draft. They have the mistaken notion that a paper is something you should be able to do “all at once.” But for almost everyone, writing means hard work

and lots of--Be surę, then, to take your paper through the entire

series of drafts that you probably will need to write an effective composition.