Reflections on the State of the Draft

First off, my draft is, at this juncture, a bloody, tattered mess. It has been dissected into jagged, scarcely related pieces and has yet to be successfully reconstructed. Hopefully that will happen soon, but I am beginning to have serious doubts. I don't know any more what I think, let alone how to write it.

Having cleared that up, here is my current reflection:

• What would you describe as your purpose in your current draft?
• My current intent is to clear up the controversy about which way of teaching grammar is better

•  For whom are you writing?
• I thought I was writing for potential and vacillating English teachers, who I still might include in my audience, but I am starting to feel like I am also writing to a more public audience - parents perhaps - who might be demanding "the basics" in writing instruction and think that means prescriptive grammar.

•  How have you shaped your writing to address that audience, given your purpose?
• I am including more definitions and examples so that the paper makes sense to a broader audience.

• Describe the main points of your argument. Why are the main points arranged as they are in your current draft? Given your audience and purpose, what other arrangements might work?
• My main points right now are the definitions of the two approaches, why some prefer one over the other, and the advantages to not being so restrictive in application and pedagogy. They are arranged with the controversy explained first, the terms defined, and then the pros and cons, followed by the reasons to use a blended approach and hopefully further examples. Things could be rearranged but I think that would create more confusion than it would solve.

• Is your audience likely to find your sources persuasive? Why—or why not? Do you have enough sources? Are they from an appropriate time frame? Are they from sources appropriate to your argument and purpose?
• I think that most of my audience will think that they know more than they do about the subject, and will learn about not only the rigid sides of the argument but the advantages to compromises in between, and how that might look in a classroom, and my sources provide some illustrations for that. I think they are persuasive, and  once the paper is tightened up, will be even more so. I have too many sources, all of them contemporary and relevant. My challenge now is to get the paper down to a reasonable size from a massive, wandering chapter book.

• Describe the style of your writing. How is this style appropriate for your audience? How might you modify the style to be even more appropriate?
• My paper has vacillated from highly formal to more conversational and at the moment it is slanting toward more conversational because I think that is the appropriate tone for the argument I am making and the audience I am writing to.

•  What do you think your audience will walk away from your paper thinking? What might they feel when they finish reading? What do you hope they will do?
• I am hoping my audience will walk away from my paper with a greater understanding about why people get hyped up about grammar and the teaching of  it, and some ways that might work to attach teaching it.

•  What are your main choices in shaping your writing—the main strategies you have chosen—that will help readers finish reading so that they think, feel, and/or do what you just described?
• My hope is that my writing will provide ample support for my argument as well as an interesting enough approach to get people to read it, that in doing so they will find the arguments both relevant and useful. My strategies are to make it engaging, informative and a little bit provocative so that they will see that things are not as black and white as they may have initially thought.

• Based on all the above, what modifications do you think you will make in order to make your writing stronger still?
• It's a mess. Hopefully by applying all of these things it will clean itself up and make itself presentable. Soon, I hope, as well.