"draft of the essay" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you are talking about the outline, general structure, or initial version of the essay. For example, "Before I began writing the final version of my essay, I wrote a draft of the essay to help organize my ideas."
A biographer can make educated guesses: maybe Margaret Fuller was behind this sentence, or maybe one of the proteges that she introduced Emerson to -- like Samuel Gray Ward, the handsome young scion of a Boston banking family to whom Emerson sent the first complete draft of the essay.
That exchange never actually made its way into the final draft of the essay I wrote for Writers Bloc, though it was there in an early version – but nonetheless when I heard the anecdote I understood that it was conversations of this kind that would lie at the heart of articles written by those of us who communicate our understanding – and our confusion – about the world through narrative.
But his use of the term and his explication of the concept did not fully come together, it appears, until Two Concepts of Liberty (1958; even then, his articulation of pluralism is absent from the first draft of the essay).
The essay was lost by The Post, and Bulosan, who had no carbon copy, had to track down the only draft of the essay at a bar in Tacoma.
Write the first draft of the essay.
Once you've written a solid draft of the essay, you can review it to look out for any grammatical errors, confusing phrasing, and repetitive ideas.
Although editors saw the covert reporting cited in the drafts of the essay, I found no evidence that anyone asked who had approved that deviation from the paper's ethics policy.
These papers included letters, several drafts of the Essay and other works.
JHP reviewed and commented on the successive drafts of the essay and contributed to the policy analysis.
GO developed the initial draft of this essay and contributed to later editing.
DY developed the initial draft of this essay and contributed to later editing.
