It’s Just a Draft: On the messy, the unfinished and the speculative in writing

Abstract

Language, and by extension writing, are used in conjunction with art to explain, decipher and decode. With the move of art education to be increasingly in line with academic practice, the written work undertaken by art students is measured and governed by expectations of being refined, finished and persuasive. Practice is often an altogether messier endeavour than the writing that accompanies, explains and justifies it would have you believe. Considering the relationship between writing and practice, It’s Just a Draft proposes the relevance of writing that falls short of academic expectations: the messy, the unfinished and the speculative. The article focuses on various aspects of written practice, namely: process, and the notion of embracing all stages of writing in a finished text; drafts, the idea of writing and rewriting/thinking and rethinking text as a continuous and developmental cycle; and style, more specifically what constitutes an academic voice. The article reflects somewhat on its own implication in relation to these ideas, being paradoxically more formulaic than the sort of writing that it discusses.