Discovery Draft

A discovery draft is a strategy for coming up with or developing your ideas. A discovery draft is similar to freewriting in that you can write freely, ignoring the structure and the development of your ideas for the time being. You can also forget about matters of grammar and style.

But writing a discovery draft is different from freewriting in that a discovery draft makes a conscious attempt to focus on and to develop an idea or ideas. In other words, a discovery draft is like freewriting with an agenda. Because you have an agenda, discovery drafts tend to be more structured than freewritings. 

A discovery draft should NOT be a first draft of your paper.  It should be a lot more exploratory and experimental.  It raises questions and explores alternatives, rather than trying to figure everything out.  

Think of writing a discovery draft as writing a letter to a friend about your paper. You might first summarize for your friend's benefit what the assignment is, and what problems you think you might have fulfilling it. 

In a personal-experience assignment like this, you might then raise questions about your experience. You might note contradictions. You might address and then work out any confusion that you have about your topic. You can write down what memories are most vivid in your mind about your topic, and then try to figure out why those particular memories are so vivid.  

In writing the discovery draft you might have an "ah-ha!" moment, in which you see something that you hadn't seen before. And you break off in mid-sentence to explore it.  The "ah-ha!" moment is the one of the points of the discovery draft. When writing the discovery draft, your thoughts are focused on your topic. You are putting words to your questions and observations. In this process the mind almost always stumbles across something new - makes a discovery.  With this discovery, you figure out how you basically want to approach your paper.

One very important thing you want to do in a discovery draft is to start to think about a RHETORICAL OUTLINE for your own paper: in other words, think about not what you want each part of what you write to say, think about what you want each part of your paper to DO:

-- I want my paper to show really vividly how much I freaked out when my mom said I couldn’t play Half Life 2 till I got my grades back up.
-- I want my paper to describe the most exciting parts of HL2 to show people who don’t know it (or don’t like it) how somebody can really get into it.
-- I want my paper to show my ethos as being a smart, not violent, interesting guy, who really likes this game for good reasons, and gets pissed off when people blame real-world violence on FPS video games.

What do you want your paragraphs to DO, and how does that tie in with what you want the overall paper to DO?

<div style="font-size:12px;"><hr /><p>Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on unofficial pages of California State University, Dominguez Hills faculty, staff or students are strictly those of the page authors. The content of these pages has not been reviewed or approved by California State University, Dominguez Hills.</font></p></div>