Lecture Notes: Writing A First Draft

“Mix It All Together With Synthesis” compares synthesizing sources to baking a cake. It explains how synthesis differs from summary, how to group sources by what they have in common, and how transition words show the reader how sources relate.

Write is Step 4 of the technical writing process: create a detailed working draft, and iterate as necessary.

Writing a document by yourself, from a blank page, is one kind of task. Writing one from research, other people’s notes, and a team of co-authors is another, and it’s the kind you’ll do most often at work. This week covers what changes when the draft comes from more than one source and more than one writer.

Writing a First Draft

In technical writing, a first draft is usually built from material you didn’t write from scratch: your research notes, other people’s content, and sections drafted by teammates.

A draft built straight from notes reads like notes. Each source brings its own framing, its own terms, and its own voice. If the writer leaves those as they are, the reader has to sort them out. The work of Step 4 is turning several sources into one text that reads as though one person wrote it, for this reader and this purpose.

Synthesis

Synthesis means drawing on several sources to show how they relate and what they add up to.

Synthesis is different from summary. A summary restates what one or more sources say. A synthesis shows how the sources relate to each other, where they agree and disagree, and what conclusion the combined information supports. A summary paragraph tends to read like a list of facts. A synthesis paragraph uses words like also, while, and however to show how one piece of information connects to the next, and it ends with a point none of the sources made on its own.

Literacy researcher Nancy Spivey calls this work discourse synthesis, and she breaks it into three operations.

Operation	What It Is	What to Do
Selecting	Deciding which content from your sources matters for this document	Pull out what answers your reader’s questions, and leave the rest in your notes.
Organizing	Finding how pieces from different sources relate to each other	Group sources by what they have in common, in the order your reader needs rather than the order you found them.
Connecting	Linking information across sources into one continuous text	Write the transitions, name where each claim came from, show where sources agree and disagree, and state what the information adds up to.

Two of these should sound familiar.

Gather Key Info asked you to select, and HATS asked you to organize. What’s left for the Write step is connecting: turning selected, organized material into sentences and paragraphs that read as one text.

Research on writers who combine multiple sources supports this approach. Students who are taught to select, organize, and connect produce better-integrated writing than students who are told to read their sources and then write.

In academic writing, the conclusion a synthesis reaches is often the writer’s own argument. In technical writing, it’s usually what the combined information means for the reader: whether a program met its goal, which account of an event holds up, or what a decision-maker needs to know. It comes from the evidence, not from the writer’s opinion.

Writing With Others

Most workplace documents have more than one author.

One survey of engineers found they spend close to a fifth of their work week writing with others. Researchers Paul Benjamin Lowry, Aaron Curtis, and Michelle Rene Lowry identified five common ways teams divide up a document.

Strategy	How It Works	Risk
Single-author	One person writes the whole document.	Efficient, but the document reflects one person’s thinking more than the group’s.
Sequential	Each person writes a part in turn, building on what came before.	Organized, but later writers may feel locked into earlier choices.
Parallel, by section	Sections are split up and written at the same time.	Fast, but sections tend to sound like different people wrote them.
Parallel, by skill	Sections go to whoever is best suited to write them.	Matches people to sections, but still leaves separate voices to reconcile.
Reactive	The group writes together in real time, responding to each other as they go.	Builds a shared voice, but is hard to coordinate with more than a few people.

Teams also decide who’s in charge of the document and who does what.

Document control. Some teams put one person in charge of the whole document from start to finish. Others pass control from person to person as the draft moves forward, or let each person control their own section.
Roles. A writer drafts. An editor can make style and content changes across the whole document. A reviewer reads and comments without making changes directly.

Dividing by section is a common approach, and it’s also the one most likely to produce a document with several voices in it. A team using it needs someone to own the final pass, and it helps to decide who that is before drafting starts.

The Write Procedure

The procedure for this step has a pre-step and four stages: Set Up the Team, then Select, Organize, Connect, and Unify.

Step	What It Is
Set Up the Team (pre-step)	Choose how the work will be divided, who controls the document, and who holds which role. Agree on shared rules for citing sources, naming terms, and basic style before anyone drafts.
Select	Go back to the question each heading answers, and pull from your notes only the content that answers it. Material that’s interesting but doesn’t serve the section stays in your notes.
Organize	Within each section, group sources by what they have in common, even when they came from different writers. Decide what your reader needs first, and put the main point first in each paragraph, followed by the evidence for it.
Connect	Write transitions that show how sources relate, such as also for agreement and however for contrast. Name your source in the sentence where you use it. Where sources disagree, say so, and say which one you’re relying on and why. Then state what the combined information means for your reader.
Unify	Have one person read the full draft for a single voice and smooth out shifts in tone or terminology between sections. Then check every claim against the original notes.

Andre Compiles a Grant Progress Report

The Situation

Andre coordinates an after-school tutoring program at three schools, and the program’s grant funder has asked for a six-month progress report.

The report needs one section on program activity and one on budget. Andre didn’t run any of the three sites himself, so his material comes from other people: a monthly log from each site lead, and a budget summary from the program’s part-time bookkeeper.

Set Up the Team

Andre decides to write the report himself and treat the others as contributors.

The three site leads are busy, so he doesn’t ask them to draft sections. Instead, he emails them the funder’s questions and asks the bookkeeper to confirm the total number of students served. Before he starts, he settles one definition with all four: a student counts as served if they attended at least one session that month. One site lead had been counting only students who came to every session.

Select

The funder’s template asks three questions, and those decide what goes in.

The questions are how many students were served, what activities ran, and what has changed since the last report. Andre goes through the three logs and pulls out what answers them. One log has a long note about a scheduling conflict over the school gym. It doesn’t answer any of the three questions, so it stays in his notes in case the funder asks about it later.

Organize

The funder wants numbers first, then the story behind them.

Andre puts the total number of students served at the top of the activity section. He groups the activities from all three sites by what they have in common, under shared headings such as reading support and math support, instead of writing three site reports back to back. The funder is evaluating one program, not three sites.

Connect

Two logs report different session counts for the same week.

One site lead counted a field trip day as a session, and the other didn’t. Andre writes a sentence noting the difference and explains which count the report uses. The funder’s definition of a session doesn’t include field trips, so he reports the lower number and names the log each figure came from.

He also notices that two sites saw enrollment climb after adding a second weekly math session, while the third site, which didn’t add one, stayed flat. None of the logs says this on its own. Andre states it plainly in the report, because it’s what the three logs add up to and it’s information the funder can use.

Unify

The three logs arrived in three different styles: full sentences, bullet fragments, and a numbered list.

The funder will read one report, so Andre rewrites everything into one consistent voice and tense. Before sending it, he checks every number in the final draft against the original logs and the bookkeeper’s summary.

The Result

The funder receives one report that reads as though one person wrote it.

Each number traces back to a log or the bookkeeper’s summary, the one disagreement between sources is explained, and the report tells the funder something none of the four contributors said on their own.

Conclusion

In technical writing, a first draft usually combines other people’s material, and often other people’s words, into one text.

Select pulls the right content out of your notes. Organize groups it in the order your reader needs. Connect turns separate pieces into one continuous text, with sources named, disagreements addressed, and a clear statement of what the information adds up to. Unify makes the finished document read as though one person wrote it, even when several people did.

Sources & Further Reading

Everything referenced above, if you want to go to the originals.

“Mix It All Together With Synthesis: How To Synthesize Research for Writing” (video) — assigned viewing, embedded at the top of this page. Source of the synthesis-versus-summary distinction, grouping sources by common threads, and using transitions to show how sources relate.
Nancy Nelson Spivey, The Constructivist Metaphor: Reading, Writing, and the Making of Meaning (Academic Press, 1997) — source of discourse synthesis and the selecting, organizing, and connecting operations.
Martínez, Mateos, Martín, and Rijlaarsdam, “Learning History by Composing Synthesis Texts,” Journal of Writing Research (2015) — evidence that teaching these operations improves students’ synthesis writing.
Paul Benjamin Lowry, Aaron Curtis, and Michelle Rene Lowry, “Building a Taxonomy and Nomenclature of Collaborative Writing to Improve Interdisciplinary Research and Practice,” Journal of Business Communication 41, no. 1 (2004): 66–99 — source of the five collaborative writing strategies, document control, and roles.
Matt McKinney et al., “Collaborative Writing,” Howdy or Hello? Technical and Professional Communication, Ch. 13 (Texas A&M, open textbook) — applies Lowry et al. to student writing teams; source of the engineering survey figure.