It's not a stretch to say that if we are using Instagram. But why would we? What is the actual utility of the service? Of all the services I do not use, this is the service for which I can see no use.

Despite the excess consumption Instagram-loving millennials are used to seeing in places like California, “richer” states can have some of the highest rates of poverty. Beyond the psychological effects of social media that coerce vain people like me to buy more things than I need and jeopardize my own finances, one question I have is: does our use of social media worsen socioeconomic inequality and strengthen institutional racism? I believe that the answer is a resounding yes.

Is this a matter of belief, or one of study? The introduction to this draft now says "I'm going to tell you my feeling about whether a useless service I use has bad consequences for people other than me."

This is a potentially valuable discussion of a subject tangentially-related to the supposed subject of the draft. Regulatory changes designed to capture more behavior by lenders that is already illegal but that has changed technological form are useful. Here they are cast in speculative terms, about what might happen. But none of this bears on the ostensible subject of the draft, which is whether presently-existing social media increase economic inequality.

This draft too boxes itself out of its own responsibilities, ending up with a conclusion decrying its own habit of "broad statements devoid of specifics." And indeed, the specifics that are lacking concern a peripheral issue (how to control already illegal racial discrimination in lending) that has replaced the original subject, whether social media increase economic inequality, about which—with the exception of a single legislative staff report Googled up out of legislative context—there are no specifics or analysis at all.

Taken together, the two successive drafts show where the greatest source of improvement in your writing lies: careful outlining of a focused question resulting from systematic research. You can write well what needs to be written. It's the editorial function of focusing relentlessly on a topic and reporting the story that goes awry.

Both drafts take a point of departure they cannot sustain. This draft proposed a clear subject, which the earlier one did not, but then abandoned it for a subpoint as to which Google provided some news stories and one legislative report. Reducing racial biases in lending and housing access has been an objective of at least one political party's policy machinery for half a century. There is a great deal written and a large body of research. Intersecting with it tangentially, only to wind up without specifics in an area dominated by them, suggests the editorial failure. Your inner editor should be saying about every word in the outline (whose existence is purely theoretical so far as this draft itself shows), "how does this advance my argument, giving the reader more material and more clarity?" Anything in the outline that can't be reported on the basis of sources you have weighed and consider trustworthy, or which doesn't advance the illustration of your subject, should be replaced. When the outline is solid the draft should be written around it. Once you have internalized that discipline, all your legal writing will benefit substantially.