Hi everyone! I just got off reading through the article 'Shitty First Drafts' and the handout 'Incorporating Sources into Research Writing' today and I could not wait to share my first thoughts about it! The author, Anne Lamott in her article reassures that the writing process is messy and doesn't need to be perfect in the first drafting stages. Instead, “shitty first drafts” lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and third drafts. All good writers write shitty first drafts. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.
The author further dispels the notion that great writers write a masterpiece immediately and effortlessly. Writers do not just sit down at their computer feeling confident and inspired. She mentions that very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. The right words and sentences just do not come most of the time.
The author suggests getting our draft all down on a paper because there may be something great in it that we would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. Moreover, if we find different lines or phrases that we love, we can take them and then create a story around it. At the end of the day, almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. We need to start somewhere.
The handout, 'Incorporating Sources into Research Writing', highlights the different ways of incorporating sources. These include Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting. While intergrating sources, paragraph structure is essential. It includes the Topic Sentence, Introduction of the source, Using and Citing the source, and Analysing the source.
The handout also mentions some general tips to integrate sources including being selective, i.e., only including relevant information, being concise (making sure all the information ties back to the thesis statement), not overusing sources and quotes, etc. However, it highlights that source incorporation works a bit differently in the sciences. The key in the sciences is avoiding over-explanation of the sources. Sources are contextualized within a paragraph with topic sentences before being used and analyzed, but they are not necessarily explained.
In fact, I came across something similar while reading about a chapter on '6 First Drafts' by Brandi Bain et al. In the chapter, one of the important conclusions the authors highlight is that writers write a first draft since they know that no matter how hard they try, their work will not be perfect on the first go. It takes time and patience to create a masterpiece. No one is perfect. Here is the link to the chapter:
https://eng121slu.pressbooks.com/chapter/first-drafts/
There is also an interesting video on this topic that explains how to write the First Draft of a Research Paper: