By 
The first draft of anything is a conversation with yourself. It wanders, repeats, argues with its own premises and occasionally stumbles on the sentence it was looking for all along. That is its job. Nobody else needs to read it.
The second draft is where the reader arrives. You go back through the pages with a different question: not "what do I think?" but "what does somebody else need, in what order, to follow me there?"
Cutting is a form of listening
Most of a second draft is subtraction. The paragraph you were proudest of turns out to be scaffolding: useful while you were building, invisible once the wall stands. The three examples become one good one. The clever aside goes into a notebook for a different essay.
The second draft is the first one written for someone else.
It helps to print the draft, or at least change its font and width, so it stops looking like your own thinking. A new shape on the page makes the familiar sentences strange enough to judge.
A short checklist
- Can you say what the piece is about in two sentences, and does the opening promise exactly that?
- Does every section earn its place, or is one there because it was hard to write?
- Where would a reader stop? Fix that paragraph first.
- Read it aloud. Your ear catches the sentences your eye forgives.
None of this is glamorous. But the essays we return to were almost all written twice, and the second time was the one that counted.
