Writing a draft
Every once in a while you have to write a draft for some sort of text, as a starting point for somebody to give feedback or improve upon it – maybe a short abstract, a chapter for a thesis or paper, an important email or a proposal. So, what makes up a good draft?
The nature of a draft is to (a) be written quickly and (b) give a good (~80%) impression of how the final thing will appear and function. This means that you have to focus on the main lines, ignoring any unnecessary details. But what are the main lines of a piece of text?
It is the “red thread””, the structure of your arguments: The reader gets a good (~80%) idea of how your text might be received by being able to follow the logical structure of your arguments: to see if they are convincing (i.e., win the reader over to follow your line of thought). The presentation of these arguments however is less important: If you just write bullet points, in a different language, or still have some typos or unattractive formulations doesn’t matter that much. It is what you have to say (convincing facts) in which order (argumentation) that matters.
This in turn helps to realize how not to write a draft: Copying e.g. together pieces of text in nice formulations that might contain useful facts but have been written with another intention helps near to nothing to see if the final text might work. Also, putting facts in a still random order doesn’t help at all.
It really is the outline of your thoughts that is of utmost importance; this is essential, and everything else is detail (that might be abstracted away). The only problem is: Devising a convincing line of thought (i.e., making up your thoughts in the optimal sequential order) is the hard part of writing - comparable in hardship with programming an algorithmic solution to some technical problem. But skipping this part, caring instead for e.g. the release notes, header comments, and interfaces around it (to stay in the software development analogy) doesn’t help the one waiting for the draft at all - it’s just annoying.
If your task is to write a draft - outline your arguments in the best possible way you can. Everything else is a redelegation of work. If you find it hard to come up with a good draft by this definition – take comfort in the fact that it is indeed difficult (like programming), but very much doable (in the same way that writing a program is: it takes some time and concentration to write both, because it involves abstract thinking). Writing doesn’t come naturally, but it improves with every dedicated half our spend on it. You can do it! Just take your time.