In the context of written composition, drafting refers to any process of generating preliminary versions of a written work. Drafting happens at any stage of the writing process as writers generate trial versions of the text they're developing. At the phrasal level, these versions may last less than a second, as writers compose and then delete trial sentences; as fully developed attempts that have reached the end of a stage of usefulness, draft documents may last for perpetuity as saved "versions" or as paper files in archives.

Background of Draft Writing and Some Effects

Draft Writing, we are used to the annoying step we continuously have to do when we have a big paper, we have to revise, we plan our thoughts. We write in so many different scenarios, but as writers, we don't realize how impactful it is to our process of writing. Typically one should be used to writing multiple drafts until finally having their paper finalized. It may take a couple of drafts, but even though it may be difficult to start, it generally helps improve better than the other draft. Young students are taught this way, according to much research because it helps students make it easier for them to write something. It helps them build up skills to grow into developing more skills. Skills take time to grow, if students start at a young age it can make them a strong writers once their education levels are higher.

In a book that became popular in the 1950s, The Elements of Style, Strunk and White characterize a first draft as a less-edited version of the final draft with the purpose of "foresee[ing]...the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape". In Writing Without Teachers, a more recent take on the role of draft documents, Peter Elbow characterizes a draft less as a first attempt at a predetermined final point and more as an attempt at exploring and where a final version might end up. As he puts it, “[w]riting is a way to end up thinking something you couldn’t have started out thinking.” According to Elbow, the best way to accomplish this is a series of drafts which come together to produce an emerging “center of gravity” that then translates into the main focus on the work—a holistic process, in other words, rather than the linear process envisioned by Strunk and White and early writing process theory. Elbow reasoned that if a writer "learns to maximize the interaction" among their "ideas or points of view, [they] can produce new ones that didn’t seem available."

Empirical studies of writers at work indicate that writers can be doing any or all of the following during phases of drafting:

• developing cohesion
• organizing their thinking in relation to text produced so far
• experimenting with phrasing
• explaining or linking examples/ideas
• generating transitions
• discovering a central argument/point
• elaborating on key ideas
• pausing to make adjustments to spelling, word-choice, and syntax