Many people enter writing workshops believing that they should decide what they want to say before writing it down.
That is not how it works. Most academic writing, and most writing of any kind, works the other way around. The writing is where the thinking happens. The false starts, the overwriting, the parts you delete, those aren’t wasted effort. They’re the thinking. A writer who drafts a section has a document and an understanding. A writer who asks someone else (or something else) to draft that section has only a document.
This comes up most urgently in conversations about AI. In the AI and writing workshop, I describe cognitive offloading as giving an external tool part of the thinking. The result can be prose you cannot defend because you did not form the ideas yourself. Difficult drafting is often unpleasant because the writer is still deciding what to say. Removing that difficulty may also remove part of the work.
The same problem shows up in paraphrasing. The common advice is “put it in your own words,” which I’d file next to “use commas when you need to take a breath.” The advice treats a conceptual task as mechanical. Your reason for using a source should guide how you paraphrase it. That only works if you’ve thought through why you’re using it on the page.
When students tell me they are stuck, the trouble may be in the thinking. A rough draft can help them identify what remains unresolved.
Earlier: “Open secret: Graduate students don’t like writing”.