Originating from widely diverging critical outlooks and working on corpora that are themselves very different from one another, these literary geneticists do not constitute a ‘school’ in the official sense, which would have its own terminology fixed by dogma. Their panoply of ideas and concepts can alter as they acclimatize themselves to works and to critical orientations chosen to interpret the avant-texte: a genetic study of the unconscious in the rough drafts of a poetic work will not use exactly the same terminological instruments as a narratological study on the compositional genetics of a novel. Yet whatever approach is chosen, whatever corpus examined, genetic critics have grown accustomed to tailoring the categories with which they try to classify and interpret genetic documents, in the analysis of manuscripts, as precisely as possible. Among these typological conceptions, the category of the ‘rough draft’ has, over the last twelve years or so, been the object of various attempts at definition, principally in the shape of monographs on genetic research.