• The First-Paragraph Test: How I Decide Whether a Draft Is Worth Finishing
  • Question 1: What is this paragraph for?
  • Question 2: Would this survive being read second?
  • Question 3: Is there a specific noun in the first three sentences?
  • What I do with drafts that fail

§The First-Paragraph Test: How I Decide Whether a Draft Is Worth Finishing

Most drafts die quietly. Not because the idea was bad, but because the writer kept going out of momentum and never asked the hard question: does the first paragraph earn the second one? I run every draft through a simple test before I invest more time. Three questions, one minute each.

§Question 1: What is this paragraph for?

Every paragraph has a job. The opening’s job is to make a promise the rest of the piece keeps. Read yours and finish this sentence: “By the end of this piece, the reader will ___.” If you can’t fill it in, the paragraph is decoration, not an opening. I draft with AIWriter to get words on the page fast, then I cut anything that doesn’t serve the promise - usually the first two paragraphs.

§Question 2: Would this survive being read second?

Skip your opening and start at paragraph two. Better? Paragraph three? The strongest opening is often hiding one screen down, buried under throat-clearing. The fix is mechanical: write the draft, delete the first paragraph, read what remains. If it still makes sense, the cut was correct. The article and content writer tools are built for exactly this kind of iterative drafting - generate variants, keep the one that survives the deletion test.

§Question 3: Is there a specific noun in the first three sentences?

“We live in a world of rapid change” contains zero information. “Last Tuesday, my editor cut half my article” contains a day, a person, an action. Specificity is what makes a reader continue. Blog posts are where this bites hardest: a blog post draft with a concrete opening outperforms a clever one nine times out of ten, because concrete is readable and clever is risky.

§What I do with drafts that fail

A failing draft isn’t a failed draft - it’s an unfinished one. Failing question 1 means the idea needs sharpening, not the prose. Failing question 2 means cutting, not rewriting. Failing question 3 means one concrete detail away from working. The pattern is the same every time: the mechanical fixes (cut, specify, reorder) are cheap; the judgment call (is this worth finishing?) is the expensive part, and it’s the part only you can make.

Run the test. It takes three minutes and it has saved me from polishing drafts that were never going to work.

Filed from the editing desk, October 2026.