Something rough
Everything begins with something rough. A draft.
Since I’ve been missing a lot in my blogging, this post, as is directly observable, is something unpolished, a kind of just-so-I-can-post-something post. This I wrote while I was doing nothing and my students were toiling on an activity I assigned to them.
It’s interesting how in our less backward society, where computers proliferate like eczema, drafts have ceased to be a physical entity and that on a computer monitor, a writer can have as many as 10 drafts without being aware that he has actually made those number of drafts.
A draft is only physically possible on a piece of paper but not on a computer. A monitor of a computer poses different challenge when it comes to writing a rough draft (a common redundancy) such as the number of copies made (virtual copies that got deleted should be included), the supposed apparent corrections but have gone invisible (virtual corrections are also counted as corrections still).
Unless written in script on a piece of paper, I think it is too much a task to ask writers to come up with real drafts when they’ve already done several virtual drafts. It’s redundant, like rough drafts.
Posted on July 28, 2010, in Academe, Ateneo De Manila University, Commentaries, Informal Essay, Journalism, Life, Writing and tagged Drafts, Eczema, Rough Drafts, Viertual corrections, Virtual Copies, Writers. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
There’s a facility on word where you can highlight changes made. I use it for drafting documents at work. If you switch it on when changing, you will have a result similar to your written page above, only typed rather than handwritten. I think it is marked “track changes” – if you do a search in word help you will find it whatever your version. You can also save a clean copy as well as the marked up copy.
I think eczema results in the skin equivalent of a rough draft?
i’ve never tried using this… thanks for suggesting this sdaedalus. i’d usually ask my students to write everything in script to keep them from copying from the net or i’d usually let them write during class hours, especially the major papers. i’m still very traditional when it comes to writing.
a friend of mine already volunteered to help me with the ‘track changes’.
i never thought of eczema as an equivalent of a draft. hahaha.
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