A discovery draft is a strategy for coming up with or developing your ideas. A discovery draft is similar to freewriting in that you can write freely, ignoring the structure and the development of your ideas for the time being. You can also forget about matters of grammar and style.
But writing a discovery draft is different from freewriting in that a discovery draft makes a conscious attempt to focus on and to develop an idea or cluster of ideas. In other words, a discovery draft is like freewriting with an agenda. Because you have an agenda, discovery drafts tend to be more structured than freewritings. They also tend to be written more or less coherently, in complete sentences.
Think of writing a discovery draft as writing a letter to a friend about your paper. You might first summarize for your friend's benefit what the assignment is, and what problems you think you might have fulfilling it. In a personal-experience assignment like this, you might then raise questions about your experience. You might note contradictions. You might address and then work out any confusion that you have about your topic. You can write down what memories are most vivid in your mind about your topic, and then try to figure out why those particular memories are so vivid. In writing the discovery draft you might have an "ah-ha!" moment, in which you see something that you hadn't seen before. And you break off in mid-sentence to explore it.
In a sense, the "ah-ha!" moment is the point of the discovery draft. When writing the discovery draft, your thoughts are focused on your topic. You are giving language to your questions and observations. In this process the mind almost always stumbles across something new - makes a discovery. With this discovery, a paper is often launched.
Please include at least some possibilities as to the kind of challenges you anticipate in doing this particular project.
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