The habit of the second draft

Most students write one draft. They write it, read it once for spelling, and hand it in. The single most reliable improvement available to them costs nothing and takes twenty minutes: write a second one.

The reason a second draft helps is not that the first was careless. It is that writing serves two purposes that cannot be done well at the same time. The first draft is where you work out what you think. This is messy by necessity, because thinking is messy, and sentences written while still deciding tend to carry the shape of the deciding — long, hedged, circling back. The second draft is where you arrange what you worked out for a reader who was not present for the thinking.

This explains a common experience. A paragraph that felt clear while writing reads badly a day later, not because standards rose overnight but because the writer no longer has the context they had in their head at the time. That gap is exactly the gap every reader has, permanently.

The most useful second-draft move is also the simplest: find the sentence that states your actual point, which is usually somewhere in the middle or at the end, and move it near the front. Writers very often reach their argument by writing their way towards it, then leave it where they found it.

Read the result aloud. Any sentence you stumble over is a sentence a reader will stumble over, and your mouth will find problems your eye has agreed to ignore.