Asking for drafts is a pita move.
Exactly. With only one specific exception that I'll also explain, nobody ever asks for "drafts" except for first-time clients who are totally new to this industry and have absolutely no clue about how this works, and why the suggestion that clients ask for a draft after 25% of the project is completely ridiculous. As I've explained many times, if you don't yet trust your chosen writer, the appropriate way to limit your risk
without being an annoying PITA is simply to order only a small portion of the project with a much earlier due date than the entire project.
Here's why asking a writer to share a "draft" (or
any portion of a project) before the entire project is actually due just doesn't work:
1. Experienced writers have
thousands of projects under their belts; in my case, probably about 10,000 after 20 years of doing this. That means projects that might take a student several days or several weeks to produce take us only about a day or only a few
hours of work. So, let's say you order a 10-page project due in 3 weeks. Your project goes onto my calendar and I may write it next week or on Day 19 or 20. Whether I write it today or on the day before it's due, the amount of time I spend on it is the same and the quality will be identical. The main reason I don't wait until the day before it's due has nothing to do with quality; it's because if I leave it for the last day or two before it's due, I won't be able to accept other rush projects that could come in very close to that deadline and pose a conflict for me to make both deadlines. Regardless of
when I write a typical 10-page project, it only takes me a few hours, not multiple days.
2. Whenever you order a project for a specific due date, what you're entitled to is exactly that; no more and no less: namely,
you're entitled to your complete project no later than whatever due date you requested at the time you received a price quote. Period. Frankly, as long as I make your deadline and as long as my work is good, it's really nobody's business when I choose to sit down to write that project. So, you're asking me to see a "draft" or any portion of the project anytime before our agreed-upon due date is nothing but an annoyance that wastes my time having to address by email to explain why the answer is "absolutely not." In fact, unless you just want to email me to make sure that I haven't forgotten about your project a few days before it's due (which is perfectly fine), I don't even want to have to waste my time reading and responding to emails asking "How's my project coming along" and that's clearly explained in my FAQs. Most of the time, when clients send those types of emails, their projects are still nothing more than notations on my calendar.
3. For the same reason, experienced writers who have (literally) been doing this since before some of our younger clients were even
born no longer need to write "drafts." We do our research and then we just write the project in one sitting, maybe with a snack or a meal break or something like that. Then, we let it sit long enough to do a "cold read" later, just to catch any minor mistakes and do any necesary editing; but much more often than not, the final products is almost identical to whatever we finished writing before we do a final review for any light editing that it might require. Unless it's a huge project, the first "25%" won't be written until a couple of hours before the whole project is complete.
4. Ordering an entire large project from a writer whose work you don't already know well enough to trust that writer is a stupid thing to do in the first place, unless you wait until you have no choice and/or unless you've already done enough research about that writer to know that it's probably not really much of a risk at all. Instead of ordering a large project and then bothering your writer for "updates" or peek previews or "drafts," just order 25% of the project (or whatever's appropriate in relation to its length) with a much earlier due date than the entire project is actually due. That's a nice and simple way of protecting yourself without being an annoying PITA to your writer.
There's one exception to that general rule about "drafts":
Sometimes, professors specifically assign drafts with earlier due dates than the whole project, whether as part of a process to help students learn how to write, or to help them avoid procrastinating, or because they know that requiring drafts makes it that much harder (and more expensive) for them to pay someone else to write their projects for them. When clients present me with projects that require drafts before final submissions, I give them two choices, one of which is (necessarily) more expensive than the other, simply because it means that I have to sit down twice to work on a project that I could probably just bang out for a likely "A" in a few hours:
Option 1 is to have me simply provide the finished project before the "draft" deadline. Then, the client can mess it up, delete portions of it, move stuff around (etc.) and turn that in as a "draft," saving my finished essay for the final submission date.
Option 2 is for me to produce a "draft" by purposely leaving things out, putting it together in a less organized way than I would normally write it, and by doing a few other things to make it sufficiently imperfect to leave substantial room for improvement. I'll then provide the final essay in time for the project deadline.
The only time clients really don't have the choice between those two options is when the professor will be returning the drafts with comments and suggestions. In that case, I'll write the draft for the draft deadline and then I'll provide the complete project for the final due date and incorporate and address all of the professors draft comments and demands.
