All articles
Writing
Office hours: what forty drafts taught me
For a year I read one reader draft a week, live. The same four problems came up again and again.
Noa Kestrel
·
11 min read
Office hours started as a way to say thank you to readers. Forty drafts later, it has become the most useful hour of my week.
The four problems
The intro is too long. The point arrives in paragraph five. There are two essays fighting inside one draft. The ending apologises. Almost every draft has at least two.
Most drafts don’t need more words. They need a clearer first sentence.
The one fix
Ask the writer to say the whole piece out loud in one breath. Whatever they say is the new first paragraph, nine times out of ten.
Written by Noa Kestrel
Writer and designer in Lisbon. One essay every Thursday, short posts in between. Replies are open, and I read every one.