[reading time: about 3 ½ minutes. This post reveals that a robust planning document and not the first fully written version of the required end document should be considered THE FIRST DRAFT.]
Not everyone loves writing or finds it easy. As a student, I struggled with what our teacher called the “first draft.” I also struggled to turn that into a different “final draft.” But what is a first draft when it comes to workplace writing? [HINT: it happens before any drafting is done.]
I learned about so-called “first drafts” in school. First my writing teachers would give us a writing prompt. Then we were supposed to have a “first draft” by the following week. We’d bring these drafts to a workshop and get comments from our fellow students. From these comments, we were supposed to make a “final draft” that was noticeably different from the first draft—somehow evolved from the workshop experience.
Sound familiar?
If I’ve learned one thing from my 35+ years of doing writing consulting with very big and very small businesses, it’s this: IF THE FIRST DRAFT IS AN ACTUAL DRAFT OF A COMPLETE DOCUMENT, THE BUSINESS I’M WORKING WITH IS IN BIG TROUBLE!
We all agree that time is money. We agree that writing is vitally important to business. It’s one of the riskiest things any business does. What’s at risk? Time (money), Future Business, Reputation, Efficiency (time again), Esprit de Corps, Sanity, etc. Some call writing the lifeblood of an organization.
Any risk in business should be mitigated by robust internal controls. Since writing is very risky business, there should be a risk-mitigation process in place to make sure writing is done as efficiently as possible.
I’ve come to think of writing in any business/agency as an activity very much like building a house. So I ask participants in my writing sessions, “When does house building begin?” The first answer is often, “You dig a hole for the foundation.”
Then I ask, “What kind of house are you building? Who will be there? Why a new house? How much will it cost? What are the milestones?”
Pretty quickly we get back to the initial contact between a prospective home buyer and a builder. Where will the house be built? What are the building codes there? What will the house look like? Materials? What’s the timeline? All the big and little planning questions that need to be addressed until, after much deliberation, an architect produces blueprints for the house.
What may have started with a sketch on the back of a napkin becomes a technical blueprint—before any building has begun.
This plan is destiny.
All stakeholders have vetted the blueprint. Doubtless in the building process there will be “change orders,” alterations as reality sets in, as ideas adjust, as unforeseen needs are met. But without this first draft—the blueprints—no building will begin.
Writing in an organization should have a similar “homebuilding” process.
Depending on the riskiness of a document, there must be a process up front—PLANNING—that culminates in blueprints. The blueprints are often a thorough outline with an accompanying one-page summary of the document that will be written. This outline establishes the USER of the document (a.k.a., THE READERS), why they care, who the internal and external stakeholders are, what information is needed, where and how it will be found, what it will cost, what limitations are involved, what the document will allow the organization to say, what the milestones will be for major steps in the process, etc.
At the Government Accountability Office (GAO.gov), where I’ve been a writing consultant since 1987, this initial planning document is called The Design Matrix. As some there say, this matrix is “cussed” and “discussed” until all parties agree that the information gathering can begin.
Once a good portion of the information has been gathered, the writing team makes a thorough sentence outline and a one-page summary, along with a few other supporting documents. These planning documents are circulated a week in advance of the Message Agreement meeting. During this hour, the team meets upper management (all internal stakeholders) to talk through what the GAO report will say.
Once there is written agreement about this message and its parts, the team can begin to “draft” its report.
But the Design Matrix itself was the actual first draft of what will become the GAO report. And...design is destiny. If you launch a rocket to Mars and you’re off by a few centimeters, you’ll hit Jupiter instead.
HOWEVER...many shops where I do writing consulting do little effective writing planning. Instead, after some initial designation of tasks, the writing team gets busy on writing the report. That first version of the written report (what our college writing teachers called “the first draft”) is finally finished. When it’s reviewed, upper management is often surprised at the poor quality. Major changes must be made. So the team creates the second draft...and the third...and the fourth, etc.
In reality, if the FIRST DRAFT isn’t the blueprint itself—a full sentence outline with a one-page summary and any other planning documentation that’s helpful—the project is headed for trouble.
It’s hard enough to produce an effective report when the planning is stellar. But organizations can’t afford to allow an important writing task to wander through a non-descript process that involves a team making drafts of a document (versions) and upper management tearing those drafts down, over and over again.
Building homes has its set of internal quality controls. The writing process in organizations must have similar processes. Some research shows that given ten units of time allowed for a document to be completed, 50% of those units should be spent in planning, around 30% for so-called “drafting,” and 20% for review/editing. (Obviously this changes according to the kind of document being produced.)
So, here’s a PRO TIP, if you want good writing in your organization, build a robust planning process.
Writers and reviewers should also understand and practice a systems approach to writing and establish objective judgmental standards for each system: CONTENT/ORGANIZATION/DOCUMENT DESIGN/PARAGRAPHS/SENTENCES/WORD CHOICES/MECHANICS and graphic elements.
Contact me if you have questions about any of this or would like some help. It’s what I do.