Parent: For my friends that struggle with communicating
The Editability of Essays
When you are building an argument, there is little chance that your initial draft is of adequate quality. The opposite is true actually, the first draft should not be publication quality, because having to tailor, structure, and organize thoughts while you’re trying to generate them is actually more work than doing those four things separately.
The good thing about an essay is that you have a “general” structure which are your chapters (which needs to be moved around less frequently), but then you have smaller sub-structures that progressively gets more mobile.
Paragraphs within a chapter, sentences within a paragraph, phrases within a sentence, then word choices within a phrase. All of these objects (as in object oriented programming), can be individually edited to design a piece of work that represents a thought that is specifically yours, delivered clearly and hopefully decent.
Finally, it is useful to note that your mind is organized verbally, at the highest and most abstract levels. Thus, if you learn to think, through writing, then you will develop a well-organized, efficient mind – and one that is well-founded and certain. -Jordan Peterson’s Essay Writing Guide