Structure

The book Draft No. 4 is a collection of essays by John McPhee. As McPhee writes in the Author's Note, all of these essays have been previously published in The New Yorker. As such, they are all stand-alone pieces with each addressing a different aspect of the writing process. They vary in length but the majority are on the shorter side. Because of the fact that each essay is its own independent entity, each chapter of Draft No. 4 has its own unique structure with a beginning, middle, and end. For this reason, a reader could conceivably approach the book in a non-chronological way and read the essays in any order. However, the structure of the book as a whole might be lost upon the reader who chooses to do so.

The book's overall structure comes from the order in which McPhee chose to present the essays. While they...