The Dangerous Method, or "Can Procrastination Ever Be a Good thing?"
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Date
2016
Authors
Hawkins, Sunny
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Description
We tell it to our clients all the time: Don't keep putting that project off! You need to get started on it now! That essay you slap-dash together at the last minute, literally printing off your first (and final) draft as you're rushing to class on the morning the project is due, will, nine times out of ten, not make the grade in any sense of the word. We've all been there. Peter Elbow even has a word for this last-minute process - he calls it "The Dangerous Method": Rather than writing a rough draft, then revising, then editing - a process that can take days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the scope of your project - when writers write by the "dangerous method," we try to get our drafts right on the first try. We want our ideas to magically come together, free of problems with organization, development, spelling, or mechanics; thus, there is no need to move ideas around, to dive back into our research to find more support for our claims, or to do more with proofreading than running a spell-check.