Hey there, Congratulations on finishing your rough draft. However, you're not done, it's time to start revising towards that second draft that's closer to the finished product. In this lesson, we'll talk about how to do exactly that. Alright, now it's time to write a second draft of your blog that's closer to actually good. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to revise your first draft to better empathize with your ideal audience. You'll also know how to approach the toughest revisions for your final draft.

So remember that useful mess you made with the first draft. The second draft is when you prepare that mess for company. Now, this doesn't mean that you remodel the entire thing. You just need to clean up so that someone else can make sense of that useful mess that you put together the first time you want someone did you want to take the first draft and make it easier for someone else to understand in a second draft. So the main audience for your second draft your ideal reader, imagine the perfect audience for this blog. It can be your best friend at work, your spouse, or your partner, your biggest fan or your perfect client.

Picture, someone who loves your writing, and they'll read it eagerly to understand everything they can about it. You want to revise to help this friendly reader fully appreciate your brilliance. So that in mind, the most important qualities of a second draft are clarity and empathy. Now on clarity, you want to make sure the entire thing makes sense to someone who is not you. You want to organize sentences and paragraphs in a way that the argument flows well that these sentences all make sense. And you want to get rid of any spelling errors or grammar mistakes that are going to be distracting.

Empathy means that connecting with the reader at any point that you could imagine your ideal reader the really, really enthusiastic Audience saying, Wait, what is this mean exactly? That tells you you need to revise that point to answer that question. Think about someone how someone other than you who really wants to understand what's still get lost, confused or wonder why you said something in a certain way. Use that observation to empathize with your ideal reader and make the second draft more clear. It's also worthwhile to empathize with your ideal readers attention span, I'm making sure this draft flows well and doesn't go on too long. So signs of a good second draft, you want your argument to be clear and easy to follow.

You want to have fixed obvious mistakes from grammar or spelling and the weird phrasing that might be in there that made sense to you but wouldn't make sense to someone else. And most importantly, by the end of the second draft, someone else who is not the writer should be able to read this draft and understand it. And once that's done, you'd be ready for the hardest As part of revisions, which is satisfying your worst critics, so that in mind it is exercise time, I want you to write your second draft. Take a look at that first draft that you put together in the last lesson, I want you to look for ways to clarify your points and better empathize with your ideal reader. If you'd like an example for how I approach editing my own work, I've included a sample blog paragraph as an editing exercise as part of this course.

You can take a look at that if you'd like to see for the kind of things that I look for when I'm editing myself. Alright, so take your time and write your second draft. When you are ready, it is time to evaluate. So looking over it again, did you find any errors and spelling grammar or mechanics that you had to fix? Did you add any subheadings to your draft to make it easier for your reader to follow your argument? Did you add any explanations or details to anticipate reader questions asked me what you meant by a certain phrase or statement.

Do you feel like you could hand this second draft over to a friendly reader and they would like it, engage with it and agree with it. So let your answers to those questions guide you because we're getting ready to get into the third and most challenging draft, the final draft where you're going to make your blog actually good at last