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Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

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Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#71

Post by kazinator »

kazinator wrote: post #24

If you don't do some editing while writing a first draft, but instead defer your intent to make those corrections, you will fail to execute some of those corrections later. The virtue of editing on a computer is that you can easily correct as you go. If you don't think that's a good idea, you might as well go back to a typewriter or handwriting.

By the way, I understand that editing while writing disrupts some people's "flow". But that doesn't mean that we have to write an entire larger work in a flow. We can switch to flow mode the granularity of paragraphs or sections/chapters.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#73

Post by skissane »

tyre wrote: post #33
john-radio wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.

This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them. Creativity doesn't work that way. You'll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, "let me plan out how I will innovate." Makes no sense.

What about writing (say) a masters or PhD thesis?

For many disciplines, the actual research involves field work, performing experiments, etc., and the thesis is primarily about reporting on that process and connecting it to the pre-existing body of research. For other disciplines (for example, philosophy), the text of the thesis is all there is to the research. Maybe the later is more like creative writing and the former more like technical writing??

(My uncle did a PhD in creative writing, his PhD thesis was a novel.)

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#74

Post by gerdesj »

nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

I write in one way, I type in another and I also speak in another way. My thoughts are weird.

The words, style and delivery of my intentions through a pen/pencil/crayon differ from my spoken word and typed thoughts.

Trite "avoid ..." theses are often ... trite.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#76

Post by SteveJS »

I wrote something for myself that removes the editor entirely.

This gives a word sprint of 15 minutes with a visible goal of 1000 words. Hitting ESC leaves it ready to paste elsewhere.

No backspace, no delete, only enough feedback to know your typing is captured, and whether you are on pace.

https://github.com/SteveJSteiner/BantamScribe

It is also entirely local.

Spelling and grammar errors take something like 60 seconds to fix in any reasonable editor that has suggested spelling fixes.

The goal is to focus on the idea and dispense with what should be automated. This is for exploring ideas not refining wording.

For a novel, the choice to edit as you go is orthogonal to avoiding editing during a word sprint. The real issue is during revision you’ll find you corrected a bunch of stuff you are cutting. If that editing was cheap who cares? If you sweated over a sentence for 15 minutes you might do the wrong thing and not cut it even though that is better for the story.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#77

Post by gowld »

derefr wrote: post #44
nickjj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My blog posts and course scripts aren't just documenting code. I very rarely know what I'm going to write until I start writing. I don't even outline anything. I just start writing and relentlessly edit as I go. I do the same thing for 1,000 word blog posts as I do with 400,000+ word course scripts. If anything editing is more important for the larger pieces of work because in order to cleanly flow to the next lesson…

That's not what the parent comments are saying. The difference with technical writing isn't that you have a plan for what you're going to write. It's that you already have the domain knowledge that you're going to compile into prose. It's a communication process, rather than an invention process. A good way to think of creative writing, if you're a technical writer, is to imagine attempting to write a textbook when y…

In short, how do you write a research paper? Do you write and perfect the abstract before you do the experiment?

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#78

Post by ghaff »

robbrown451 wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't so bad when you were writing something that was going to get retyped anyway (like for a newspaper). But a lot of the time something like a paper just basically got submitted as essentially a rough draft because you weren't going to edit and retype it.

Well for school assignments we were generally expected to turn in the rough draft first. At least in high school, and sometimes in college. So rewriting was generally always expected. Either way, there was no way I'd turn in my rough draft as a final, as it would either be a mess to look at, or terribly/confusingly written. I just don't see the benefit of imposing a linear process. I prefer to start my writing with w…

I guess it's an age thing. I never turned in a rough draft and basically never typed an assignment until college for a class (leaving aside a thesis, etc.) The only time I really did back and forth editing was for newspapers.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#79

Post by Baeocystin »

nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

What you describe is how I write as well.

I've tried the 'never edit your first pass' approach before, and I found that my ideas flowed like sandpaper instead of silk. It was awful. I simply do not think in that manner.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#80

Post by ryeights »

redacted wrote: post #61

The advice we got from our professors when writing theses was: crack open a bottle of fine whisk{e}y [0], get a couple glasses in, write (while keeping your drink topped of course) until writing is a serious challenge, edit the next morning in the harsh and sober light of day [1]. Works a treat, even if you liver may not fully appreciate it. [0] Whiskey may be substituted for your preferred liquor, but it is a solid…

Hmm... I might just try this
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