Welcome back. Now that you know who your audience is, you have your title, you have your outline and you have the perfect opening for your blog post, it is time to write your rough draft. At the end of this lesson, I will take you through an exercise to help you get that first draft done. And then you will be ready for revisions. All right, it's time to learn about how to write a great first draft that will actually be good eventually. Now there is nothing you can do that will make you a better writer than getting good at the drafting and revising process.

Writing is like any other skill you can practice no matter how talented you are, you will never be the best you can be the very first time you do something. So by the end of this lesson, you will be ready to write a first draft of a blog with speed and honesty. And you'll know exactly about how to think about revising, draft two and three. So the purpose of a first draft, you want to make a useful mess. Now at the end of your first draft, you're going to have sentences that go on too long, you will have stories that don't make their point clearly, you will are going to have more than one grammar or spelling mistake. But under all that mess are a lot of big meaningful ideas that are actually good.

Later, you will fix the problems in your messy draft while polishing the good ideas that make it worthwhile. But until you write your rough draft down, you will not have anything to respond to. You won't have anything to edit and you certainly won't have anything to show other people. So that in mind, the first draft is for you. This is where you get your big ideas on paper. You can be as weird, bold and profane as you want.

Because with the rough draft, you are the only one who needs to understand what you're trying to say for now. Now that in mind the most important qualities in your rough draft speed, and honesty, the speed side is you want to get it done, you want to have as few impediments between the idea that is in your head and what ends up on the page. And the honesty side gets into that too. You don't want to try to edit yourself at this point. The rough draft is when you translate what is in your outline what is in your imagination into something that you can read and respond to on the page. This is not the time to worry about something sounding weird or stupid or being hard to understand.

The rough draft is when you get real about what you want to tell the world share what is really happening without worrying about sounding crazy or wrong. So the signs of a good first draft, you have a beginning, middle and end all of your big ideas are written down and you the writer can read it and find what you want to say in all the words. In short, you have an actual draft, you can read revise the point of the first draft is to get everything out of your head. So you can revise and edit it later. So this in mind, our next, our next point is to get into the exercise, I want you to write the first draft of your blog post. After all, you have your audience profile, you have your outline, you have your title, and you even have a great opening because you wrote that in the last lesson.

Now, I want you to take all that and try to put together a first draft of your blog as quickly as you can. I recommend you try to finish in four hours or less. So that done let's get into the evaluation stage of your draft. So did you include everything in your outline and introduction? Does your draft have? Is it feel complete?

Or is there something missing wrong or fake dishonest and do you felt you were glossing over a point you really needed to make? Can you follow your ideas the flow of your argument from the start to the end To this draft, and do you feel like this rough draft is an honest expression of what you're trying to say? It doesn't have to be a perfect expression but you want to feel like you're not leaving anything out. So let the answers to these questions help you know if you wrote a solid first draft or not. With that done, you're ready for the next lesson, how to write a second draft. That's closer to actually good