In her 1994 book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott gave a chapter a blunt title: “Shitty First Drafts.” Early in the chapter she writes: “All good writers write them.”
“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out…” Then comes the next stage. “The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up.” The chapter has been reprinted in college writing textbooks such as Language Awareness.
In 2022 Major League Baseball tried new rules in the minor leagues: a pitch clock, limits on defensive shifts and larger bases. The tests were run “ahead of possible big league use in 2023.”
The pitch clock worked. The average minor league game fell from 3 hours 3 minutes in 2021 to 2 hours 38 minutes in 2022. In September 2022, MLB’s competition committee voted to bring the changes to the major leagues in 2023.
Every week, Saturday Night Live performs its whole show twice. At 8 p.m. the cast plays a dress rehearsal for one live audience. At 11:30 p.m. the show goes on air in front of another.
In one writer’s account, about 45 sketches are read on Wednesday. Eleven to 13 are performed at the dress rehearsal, and two or three of those are cut before air. An SNL editor explained: “Our sketches will live or die by the reaction of the audience.”
On January 16, 2007, Senator Barack Obama announced that he would form a presidential exploratory committee. “For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about…” He declared his candidacy the next month, on February 10, 2007.
Federal election law calls this stage “testing the waters.” A possible candidate may raise and spend money on “polling, traveling and making telephone calls” to decide whether to run. While the person is only testing the waters, an exploratory committee does not have to register or report to the Federal Election Commission. If the person decides not to run, “there would have been no obligation to report the monies received and spent.”
Test the waters. Merriam-Webster defines it as “to make a preliminary test or survey (as of reaction or interest) before embarking on a course of action.”
Trial balloon. This is “a project or scheme tentatively announced in order to test public opinion.” The term is a translation of the French ballon d’essai.
Dip a toe in the water. This means “to try an activity briefly to see if one likes it.”
Kick the tires. This means to test something before buying it. The phrase is American and comes from people shopping for cars.
In 1999 Nick Swinmurn wanted to sell shoes online. He went to a shoe store in Sunnyvale, California, and made an offer: “I’ll take some pictures, put your shoes online, and if people buy them, I’ll buy them from you at full price.”
People bought them. The website became Zappos, which Amazon bought in 2009 for about $1.2 billion.
In July 2013, Paul Graham of the startup accelerator Y Combinator published an essay that begins: “One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale.” The most common such thing, he wrote, is “to recruit users manually.”
The founders of Airbnb went “door to door in New York, recruiting new users.” The founders of Stripe did not wait for a user to sign up. They said: “Right then, give me your laptop,” and set it up on the spot. Graham’s advice on launching: “All you need from a launch is some initial core of users.”
In 1932 the Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law that required a license to sell ice. Justice Louis Brandeis dissented. “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
Americans now speak of the states as “laboratories of democracy,” an idea that takes its name from this dissent. One example is the health care law Massachusetts passed in 2006. It became the model for the federal Affordable Care Act.
Fast-food chains often try new products in Columbus, Ohio, before they sell them nationwide. Burger King, Taco Bell and Wendy’s have all run tests there. The city has been called “Test City, USA” for decades.
The reason, as Axios explained in 2026: “Columbus offers a wide snapshot of America in one region, which helps prove whether a concept could work nationwide.”
In the original ending of Fatal Attraction (1987), Glenn Close’s character kills herself, and Michael Douglas’s character is arrested for her murder. Test audiences did not like that she escaped punishment. Director Adrian Lyne reshot the ending.
Close said later: “Six months after we finished shooting, I got a call that we had to reshoot the ending.” She fought it for weeks. The new ending became a hit, and the film was one of the highest-grossing films of 1987. Lyne has said the change “was an emotional and dramatic choice, not a financial one.”