First draft to final article - edit your work without hating yourself

Got a messy PhD thesis chapter, dissertation, or academic paper and have no idea where to start editing? If you’re overwhelmed by your first draft, beating yourself up because it isn’t “good enough,” or trying to fix everything at once, this blog is for you. I’ll show you a simple, systematic process for going from first draft to final draft — without trying to perfect everything at the same time.

You’ll learn how to:

• Stop editing text you won't end up using
• Create a reverse plan to see the structure of your argument 
• Identify what needs to be added, removed, or rearranged
• Get useful supervisor feedback earlier
• Restructure your draft without starting from scratch
• Edit in stages, from big-picture structure to grammar and formatting
• Stop feeling overwhelmed and always know what to work on next

And most importantly: a messy first draft is completely normal. It doesn't mean you're a bad academic. It means you have a draft to edit. If you're a PhD student or academic struggling with thesis writing, academic writing, dissertation editing, or finishing a first draft, I hope this gives you a process you can actually follow. 

If you prefer to watch a video version, you can find it on YouTube here.

If you're a PhD student or academic who is staring at a messy first draft of an article or a chapter, I can guess how you’re feeling. You feel like you have 100,000 things to do, that are all equally important, and you don’t know where to start. You’re beating yourself up for not getting it right in the first place, terrified that you aren’t good enough to actually make it better, and that you don’t have enough time anyway.

If that’s you, you’re in the right place. I am gonna help you go from first draft to final draft. By the end of this video you’ll have a list of straightforward steps to work through and you’ll feel capable and motivated to get going.  

How do I know? I'm Dr Vikki Wright. I'm the PhD life coach. I was a highly successful academic for 20-something years, writing articles myself, supervising PhD students through their writing journeys and even training supervisors in how to supervise you more effectively.

I understand the pain of trying to get a chaotic draft into something that feels either good enough to show your supervisor, or good enough to not make you feel like a complete idiot. I get it.

By the end of this video, you are going to have a step-by-step plan that you can just work your way through. 

But first, I want to reassure you. When I was an academic supervising my own PhD students and teaching other supervisors how to do that effectively, I would often show my PhD students the files on my computer that led to a published article. They'd usually read these articles, right? They thought I was good at what I did. They knew I was published and experienced and all of these things. And then I'd show them this list of articles and my increasingly chaotic file name system, which is another story, and they were amazed at how many versions I got through. 

I think somehow in their head, if you were good at academia, you would plan a bit, you'd write a first draft, you'd tidy up the draft, polish it a bit, change a few bits here and there, and there it was ready to go. Yet they looked at my computer and would see 35, 40 different files of increasingly edited work that it had taken to get it to the submission process, let alone through the review process and onto publication 

Usually, they were first surprised and then hugely relieved that even academics like me would take many, many iterations to get something finished. Editing is completely normal. Multiple iterations, going back to the beginning and completely changing the order, chopping huge chunks out of things you've written, all these things are absolutely, completely normal. 

The fact that you write a crap first draft is not a sign that you don't belong in academia. Fact it's taken you 10 different versions and you still don't feel like it's finished isn't a sign that you're not good enough at this or you shouldn't try anymore. 

The big difference though is that experienced academics like me have some sort of system, either explicit like I'm gonna teach you, or more implicit that you kind of built up over time. Whereas people who are more towards the beginnings of their academic process are usually just kind of trying to correct everything and hope that it's good enough. 

The second thing I always used to emphasise, particularly to PhD students, is that we have to separate drafting from editing. You'll have been told this before, and you'll probably have ignored it before. But I have an analogy to help you understand.

For me, editing while you're drafting is like ironing clothes in a clothes shop. When you go shopping and you're choosing what you're going to buy, you don't iron the clothes there and then in the clothes shop. Why not? Because most of them you're not going to buy anyway. Even those you are buying are going to get scrumpled up in the process of taking them home. Your job when you’re in the shop is to try stuff on and make some decisions – it would be an absolute waste to use that time ironing things.

Exactly the same is true if you're trying to edit while writing. Your job when drafting is to generate new text. Editing old text distracts you from the task you're meant to be doing there, and is usually a massive waste of time because you're probably going to be editing things you're going to delete later, or that you're going to change later, or you're going to mess up later when you try and clarify your argument. Don't iron clothes in the clothes shop.

Now we got that clear that everyone has to go through several rounds of edits, and we're not going to do it at the same time as drafting. Where are we going to go? I am going to assume, for the purpose of this video, that you have got a full first draft of the piece of writing. That might not be for the whole chapter, but at least of a section or whatever, and you're ready to start editing it. If that's not true, I have a video coming soon about how to write the first draft so make sure you’re subscribed.

If you have a draft, let’s go. Our first job once we've got first draft is celebrate. Woohoo! Amazing! You have done a massive chunk of the text generation process. Amazing! We'll probably have some more bits to generate later, but let's celebrate and be proud of the fact we've done that.

Next job is to actually map what we have. It's just all too overwhelming to look at together. It's like, how do you even figure out whether it's whether it's any good or not when you can’t even see it all? So the first thing we can do is map what we have, and we can do that by making a reverse plan.

A reverse plan reduces a complex draft down to a series of sentences where each sentence represents one of your paragraphs. We read a paragraph, we summarise what it says. Don't just write introduction. Say “ physical activity is associated with reduced incidence of cardiovascular disease” if that’s the takehome of your first paragraph. We go through paragraph by paragraph and summarise each as a sentence.

Even the PROCESS of doing this tells us something, so if it’s difficult, don’t freak out. If a paragraph is hard to summarise because there's two points in there. Great. Write two sentences. Make a note that they both came from the same paragraph.

If you read it and go, I don't think this paragraph says anything at all – then make a note that that paragraph can be combined into another or removed. .

We then get to a place where a long document has been reduced to a series of bullet points that SHOULD encapsulate your whole story (it won’t, don’t worry, but that’s what we’re going to fix).

From here we’re going to do a series of edits based on this plan and then later a series more edits on the full text. In between I’m going to give you an incredibly useful tip for any of you whose supervisors insist on only giving feedback on polished drafts.

For this first section, we’re ONLY looking at the reverse plan summary that you just created. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is the overall point made clear from the summary? It needs to be, by the end.
• Can you see the argument that you're making? Why it's backed up? Why it's important? Why people should listen?
• Are all the paragraphs doing a useful job? Often you can think about that in terms of are the are each paragraphs answering a mini question that builds towards the bigger question?
• Are any of the paragraphs redundant because they're repetitive?
• Are there any paragraphs missing when you were trying to summarise them?
• Were there any that you found hard to summarise because they didn't really say anything? In which case do they need to be removed?
• Did some paragraphs make two points? In which case do they need to be separated out?
• Are they in a useful order that builds a compelling argument?
• Is there a different way it could be ordered? What would be the implications of doing that?
• Do you start and finish in the most sensible places for your audience. So, as an example, do you give too much background for an already specialist audience, or insufficient background for the audience that you're working on?
• Does your conclusion actually add value rather than just tail off?

Fix any of those issues here in the reverse plan by changing, adding and/or removing those sentences. Don’t add more detail by turning them into paragraphs – clarify them here in the summary. By the end of this process, this reverse plan should read as a polished summary of your argument.

If your supervisor insists they can only give feedback on polished drafts, my unprofessional answer is they are wrong and to send them to me so I can tell them exactly why they’re wrong! My more useful answer is to ask if they would give feedback on the polished summary that we create using the reverse plan method. It won’t have all the evidence or nuance in it, but it should give them sufficient polished information to be able to see if you are making a clear and compelling argument before you put too much effort and detail into the rest of the piece.

Next step is to go back to the original text and start plopping the chunks you have into your new and improved structure. Don’t make them beautiful at this stage, pop them roughly where they go and make a note of where new text is needed. Once this is done, fill those sections with new rough drafts.

At this stage, if you hear yourself saying “it’s still so rough, I don’t sound academic enough, there’s typos and punctuation errors” I want you to say – of course there is. It’s a draft. I fix that stuff later. If you think “I couldn’t possibly leave a spelling error once I’ve seen it, I promise you totally could. You’ve absorbed a message that the important thing is for you to be all neat and tidy and then you’ll get gold stars and it’s not true any more. The important bit is to get your important work done and we’ll tidy it up later. Trust me.

So, now we have a better full draft – it’s still ugly in places, there’s still language that’s not clear or too informal, there’s errors, there’s probably still stuff we want to change structurally. But we’re starting to believe we can actually move this thing forward.

I’m now going to teach you a method that you’re going to tell me is extremely inefficient. And to explain why you’re wrong, I want you to imagine that I ask you to go on a walk. On your walk, I want you to take photos of red things that you see. Anything red. This is actually a really relaxing, almost meditative activity so I highly recommend. You’ll have a lovely walk and you’ll be spotting all sorts of things you don’t usually notice.

Now imagine I had told you to take photos of anything red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, black or white. It would be chaos. You wouldn’t get further than the end of your street and your phone gallery would be a mess. We spot things better and get further when we look for one thing at a time.

This is what we’re going to do in our draft. We’re going to pick one type of edit to do, do it all the way through, and then pick something else. Exactly what you check for is up to you but we want to start with the big macro things and then get more and more micro as we go on. I’ll share my list, but you can add your own things.

 First up is to go through all the questions we asked with the reverse plan – remember you can get a list of these in the link in the description.

After that we also look at:

• Transitions Does one paragraph flow neatly into the next? Look at the last sentence of one paragraph, first sentence of the next.
• Precision and clarity – Does it precisely state your point? Sometimes we know what we're trying to say, but other people don't know, and then it doesn't make as much sense. Check it makes sense to someone who isn’t already clear.
• Do you give sufficient evidence or go “deep enough”? By the way if that’s often a criticism, I highly recommend you and your supervisor identifying a paper that does this really well and analysing it together. What are the bits that make it really deep and precise and exact?
• Do you use terms and arguments consistently? Are there any points where you contradict yourself or use different words to use the same thing? Particularly if you're using highly technical language, as many of you will be only once all that lot is there is straight.
• Are your quotes and data accurate? I'm assuming your data has already gone through some sort of quality control process where you've checked it but is the way you've represented the data accurate? Are your graphs accurate? Are your references accurate?
• Only now do we start worrying about the glamorous stuff – is it eloquent, concise, academic? We only polish once we know we want to keep all the bits.
• If there are things that your supervisors always comment on, make a list and check for them specifically. I always used to comment on run-on sentences, fragment sentences, things like that. If you don't know what they are, look them up, see whether you do them. But make a list of the things you want to check for, and check one of them at a time.

It is not inefficient to do one bit at a time. It is much more effective. Efficient is not trying to do everything all at once and getting yourself muddled. Efficient is having a process that you can work through, do accurately, and actually see your progress through it.

So that's how you go from first draft to final draft. This isn’t a quick fix but it’s a PROCESS that you are capable of moving through. You’ll be able to see where you’re up to, what needs to be done next, and then when you’re done, you'll have a final draft that is ready to submit wherever you need it. Yay!

Send this to someone else who’s panicking about editing their work!

If you want a shareable PDF that takes you through all the steps - download it here.