In my last post, I talked about how much I love printing my first draft to make edits. This week’s rule bounces off that idea. I can’t remember where I read this, but it’s a piece of advice that has haunted me ever since: instead of just going into your original document to make that first round of edits, you should retype your entire draft from scratch.
What?!
Who has time for that? I know I don’t. But it’s something I’ve always wanted to try, and this is the Writing Rules Project, after all. I prepared for sore wrists and hoped this rule would make for a better book.
I have to confess that I didn’t end up retyping every word verbatim. Remember how I printed my draft last week? Some pages hardly had a red mark on them, and so I gave myself a few breaks with copy-paste. But I actually did retype a majority of the draft.
Was it tedious? Absolutely. Did I have to run spellcheck again? Yep. Was it worth it? Hmm…
Pros and Cons (But Mostly Pros)
This rule was actually really helpful in cleaning up my diction. I would be in the middle of typing a sentence and realize that it was kind of clunky. Since I was retyping it anyway, I didn’t have the option of just slapping a band-aid on an existing sentence by taking out a few words here or adding a phrase there. I figured I might as well just rework the entire sentence.
And it worked. It really made me think about my writing style at the very basic level. If I had to retype a whole paragraph, it gave me the chance to slow down and consider whether it was actually good enough to type again, or if some things needed changing along the way.
Worth It?
Overall, I looked back when I was done, and I had an excellent second draft. It had significant, deep changes from the first. This is definitely a rule I will use again—but only with work that I’m really serious about making better. It’s absolutely worth it for something I plan to publish, but it’s a lot of tedious time otherwise.
Have you ever retyped an entire draft? Comment your experience below.
Need some creative writing activities for kids, students, or yourself this summer? Check out the Writing Rules Mini Project I put together a few weeks back!
I’ve got stickers, notebooks, and more on Redbubble! Here’s my latest Writing Rules Project logo sticker.