<story><title>Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft</title><url>https://rolandasb.github.io/firstdraft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tyre</author><text>This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them.&lt;p&gt;Creativity doesn&amp;#x27;t work that way. You&amp;#x27;ll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, &amp;quot;let me plan out how I will innovate.&amp;quot; Makes no sense.</text></item><item><author>john-radio</author><text>The &amp;quot;never edit while drafting&amp;quot; advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.</text></item><item><author>nickjj</author><text>This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I&amp;#x27;ve written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes.&lt;p&gt;I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I&amp;#x27;ll give it all a final reordering &amp;#x2F; fixing until I&amp;#x27;m happy with it.&lt;p&gt;I feel like I can&amp;#x27;t progress to the next chunk of an article until the prior section is 95% edited because what I write next depends on what was previously written.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else work like that?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhino369</author><text>&amp;gt;This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them.&lt;p&gt;The advice to &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t edit while you write&amp;quot; usually comes after the advice to &amp;quot;make an outline&amp;quot; before you write.  You are supposed to figure out how the pieces fit.  Then quickly write it all out.  Then edit edit edit.&lt;p&gt;The general idea is that is easier to edit afterwards than to edit on the fly.  Its true for me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft</title><url>https://rolandasb.github.io/firstdraft/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tyre</author><text>This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them.&lt;p&gt;Creativity doesn&amp;#x27;t work that way. You&amp;#x27;ll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, &amp;quot;let me plan out how I will innovate.&amp;quot; Makes no sense.</text></item><item><author>john-radio</author><text>The &amp;quot;never edit while drafting&amp;quot; advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.</text></item><item><author>nickjj</author><text>This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I&amp;#x27;ve written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes.&lt;p&gt;I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I&amp;#x27;ll give it all a final reordering &amp;#x2F; fixing until I&amp;#x27;m happy with it.&lt;p&gt;I feel like I can&amp;#x27;t progress to the next chunk of an article until the prior section is 95% edited because what I write next depends on what was previously written.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else work like that?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickjj</author><text>My blog posts and course scripts aren&amp;#x27;t just documenting code.&lt;p&gt;I very rarely know what I&amp;#x27;m going to write until I start writing. I don&amp;#x27;t even outline anything. I just start writing and relentlessly edit as I go.&lt;p&gt;I do the same thing for 1,000 word blog posts as I do with 400,000+ word course scripts.&lt;p&gt;If anything editing is more important for the larger pieces of work because in order to cleanly flow to the next lesson or section of a course the prior stuff has to be pretty much in its final form.</text></comment>