The Sloppy First Draft

粗打草稿细修改 

We’ve all been there: staring at the blank page or Word document, waiting for the words to come to us. We type but the right words don’t appear. We get discouraged, check our emails, and hours later, realize we only wrote a few hundred words all afternoon.

下面的场景你一定不陌生：盯着空白纸页或新建的Word文档发呆，迟迟无法决断如何下笔。你敲着键盘，但就是写不出想要的东西；你心烦意乱，转去查收邮件，于是光阴匆匆，最后发现耗了一下午的成果只有那么可怜的几百字。

What’s the solution? Call it ‘The Sloppy First Draft’.

怎么解决这个问题呢？我管我的方法叫“粗打草稿细修改”。

Here’s what you do: get yourself set up to write. That means a comfortable chair and a cup of tea, water, or coffee. A good snack, like nuts or popcorn, helps too.

首先，整理好心情，准备妥当再去写作。选一把舒适的扶手椅，再来一杯热茶，或者热水、热咖啡也行。准备些坚果、爆米花之类的小零食自然也是好的。

Then write. Instead of measuring your progress by how perfect each sentence is, once you start writing, don’t stop until you’ve been continuously typing for 30 minutes. And then an hour. And then 2 hours. It can be nonsense. It can be comments to yourself, random ideas, or whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry about structure or relevance at this point. Before you know it, you’ll have thousands of words.

然后就是动笔。一旦开始写，在没有连续写够半小时之前别让自己停下休息，更不要以语句优美与否作为判断自己写作进程的标准。之后就是连着写一个小时、两个小时，或者更久。废话也罢，自我评价也好，又或者是什么随机的想法，不管你想到什么，写下来就是。眼下，文章结构或者内容关联度都不是你应该考虑的东西。

Undoubtedly, most of them will be garbage. But it is infinitely easier to get rid of words you don’t want than it is to try to write the perfect sentence. The Sloppy First Draft produces much more writing than you need for a 1,000 word essay or personal statement. For examples, in movies, they regularly shoot 50 times more footage than they need. That’s when the editing process becomes important. A Sloppy First Draft without good editing means a Sloppy Final Product. This system only works if you do it well ahead of a deadline, which means you can put your sloppy first draft aside for a day or two, and return to it with a heavy edit. Show it to your trusted friends, parents, and mentors. But edit, edit, edit.

不知不觉间，你就将写出千字以上的文章。当然，其中多数肯定是些无关紧要的废话。但是修改剔除多余的文字绝对比每写一句都力图优美动人要来得简单得多。初稿尽管松散，可是字数却远远超过你完成一篇千字论文或个人陈述所需要的。就像拍电影一样，摄制组通常会拍摄比所需多五十个左右的连续镜头以保证满足要求。这也就是为什么修改编辑的过程变得非常重要。未经加工的潦草初稿直接递交，反而是一篇不达要求的成品。先打草稿后修改，这个方法只有在你做事早于截止日期时才凑效，因为这种情况下，通常你可以把初稿暂时搁置一两天，之后再大刀阔斧地编辑修改。也可以把文章拿给信任的朋友、父母或者导师阅读，请他们提意见。但要不断不断不断地修改。

And that’s how you get from a blank page to a well-crafted personal statement, college essay and--take it from me--even blog post.

综上，这就是一篇空白文档如何演变成一篇经心措辞的个人陈述、课程论文的方法——如果你相信我的话——甚至博客这么写也没问题。

Describing the Details of Your Experiences in a Personal Statement

经历即财富

Strictly speaking, an experience is an event that you participate in or share that changes you. It's important to pay attention to the details here. An experience is:

（1) an Event

（2) Participatory

（3) Leads to Change

严格意义上来讲，这里的“经历”指的是你过往参与或承担的一次具有改变人生作用的大事件。注意，这份经历应当是——

（1）一次事件；

（2）你有参与其中；

（3）最终导致你的改变。

In short, the experience part of your Personal Statement should be a narrative that tells a compelling story. Here's an example of how NOT to describe an experience:

"In the first semester of college of my second year, I took an introductory course in Biology. The teacher, Professor Smith, was really great, and I decided to take more biology courses."

总之，要想漂亮地完成个人陈述的经历感悟部分，你应该做好的就是讲一个鼓舞人心的励志故事。不过，下面我将要举的则是一个经典错误案例：

“大二的第一学期，我上了生物学导论课。授课老师——史密斯教授——非常棒，所以最后我决定多上一些生物相关的课程。”

An introductory course is, by definition, an course open to everyone. It's going to be hard to tell something specific about yourself when the event is so general. Make sure that the event you are describing is interesting and unique. A better example would be: was there one particular session of the course where some question or issue was raised? Was there a time you spoke to the professor in office hours or in lab?

导论课是什么？看定义就知道，导论课对全校学生开放。所以，当你选择了这样一个普通的事件，深挖事件背后的意义再联系自身就会变得异常困难。一定要确保自己选择的事件是有趣并且独特的。这方面好一些的例子诸如：有没有哪一次上课时出现了问题？你有没有在办公室或实验室与教授当面交流？

Second, there's nothing participatory about this There is no involvement on your part: you're just describing what happened to you instead of describing what you did "I asked for more readings from Professor Smith and he directed me to the Advanced Biology book by Carpenter, which I read with enthusiasm." That's what you did, not just what happened to you.

其次，这个例子本身就没有什么参与性。从你这方来看：你只是描述了“当时我面前发生了什么事”而不是“当时我亲自做了什么事”。“我向史密斯教授询问是否还有更多（这方面）的阅读材料，于是他给我推荐了Carpenter的著作，《高级生物学》——事实证明，那是一本非常非常有趣的书。”这才是你做了什么，而不仅是单纯陈述当时发生了什么。

Finally, it's important to explain how the experience shaped you. What did you believe before that was changed? "I used to believe that Biology was only the study of microbes and organisms visible under a microscope, but Professor Smith's seminar on zoology and the animal kingdom opened up a whole new part of the field to me ." That explains how the experience was important in shaping your interests.

最后，阐明这次经历是如何改变你的才是重中之重。变化发生之前，你是怎样想的？“我以前总觉得生物学就是在显微镜下面整天观察细菌和有机体，但是史密斯教授的动物学研讨课让我看到了新世界——动物王国的大门。”这就解释了这件事在你兴趣改变中发挥的重要作用。

One word of caution: an overly narrative personal statement isn't entirely appropriate. I would suggest one, or perhaps two, experiences. The rest should be credentials and vision.

但是谨记一句话：叙述性过强的个人陈述反而不那么恰当。我建议最好只写一次经历，或最多两次。文章的其余部分则应留给你的信任状和未来规划。