Steph's Revised Writing Construct

Introduction:

Most college students see themselves as just that, students. The goal of many students in writing is to fulfill an assignment and get a ‘good grade.’ They often do not look at themselves as writers. If they have been assigned a five-page paper, they will write five pages, and only five pages. Many enter into a writing assignment with a “one and done” attitude. Therefore, the revision process is, to them, also a one and don’t process. After ‘finishing’ the paper, they revise word choice, sentence structure, and fix typos and punctuation errors.

As a peer writing tutor I have seen my fair share of students in the writing center wanting to revise their papers with the above attitude. I enter a session with a very different understanding of the process of revision, as ongoing, recursive, and multi-faceted. As defined by Debra Myhill and Susan Jones in “More Than Just Error Correction,” revision is a rewriting process that “involves alterations to meaning” (324). However, these students enter the writing center with a very different definition of revision, one more closely aligned with our definition of editing, or surface level changes, which have no real bearing on the meaning or successfulness of the paper. The differences between these understandings of revision and editing create a collision course in the writing center and classroom. And this collision course often makes for disgruntled students, refusing to accept feedback, alter their papers, or return for writing ‘help’ in the future. It is this attitude and response to critique and feedback I would like to investigate.

Synthesis:

            In “Student Writers and Their Sense of Authority over Texts,” Carol Berkenkotter brings us through a case study she conducted in a first year writing course. She shows ways students can respond to peer and teacher feedback. One student, Stan, resisted the feedback the most, stating he had “said what [he] needed to say.” He often became hostile and angry with his peers and exercised his power during peer reviews with gusto. Stan was so intent on keeping his authority over his writing he did not think of the larger picture or the possibility that a few revisions could help him create an even better piece of writing. This immaturity is addressed by Debra Myhill and Susan Jones in their article, “More Than Just Error Correction: Students’ Perspectives on Their Revision Processes During Writing.” Myhill and Jones argue, in reference to maturity and cognitive ability, immature writers allocate the majority of their thinking processes to surface level concerns, in this case authorial rights, disallowing them from meta level thinking.

            Berkenkotter’s second student, Pat, had a different problem with receiving and utilizing feedback. When his peers gave him advice he responded, “If people don’t like it they don’t have to read it.” Pat did not see the importance of audience for his text. His sense of responsibility to his text and his personal relationship with the topic (a profile of a close friend), kept him from seeing the importance of audience reaction. Myhill and Jones also grapple with beginning writers not fully taking audience into account, however they approach it from the teacher-student perspective, where grading and evaluating gets in the way of the student seeing the teacher as an interested reader.

This brings into light the misconception many beginning writers have of ‘correct/incorrect’ writing. This is a large issue basic writers face because they have been taught to write based on rules and rubrics. Because they have been taught rules instead of processes, they do not see themselves as writers or understand the recursive process of writing. If there is a right and wrong way to accomplish writing, students, with a final grade in mind, will strive only to get it right. Alice Horning and Jeanie Robertson’s chapter, “Basic Writers and Revision,” cites many case studies done over the years, showing basic writers and their revision processes. They state one student made 234 changes to a document with 210 of them being changes to “spelling, punctuation, and other linguistic issues...[which are] attempts to create writing that is correct” (58). The chapter also delves into the issues basic writers face and the skills needed for useful and effective revision.  Horning and Robertson list three types of thinking, metarhetorical, metastrategic, and metalinguistic, needed for revision, which most basic writers do not have.  To help students develop this type of meta thinking, teachers must help students to think of themselves as writers and not just students. Building a truly collaborative classroom can allow students to work toward understanding the writing process as recursive and “change [basic writers’] understanding about the nature of writing from ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to a range of options in terms of writing and revising, moving them toward the skilled writing and revising of expert writers” (58).  This could be applied by creating assignments that allow students to explore their own research topics or by using peer evaluation techniques for grading purposes.

When students see themselves as writers they are more able to not only utilize the writing process but also set goals that reach for the best piece of writing, not simply fulfilling an assignment. Reaching beyond the correct/incorrect binary frees student writers to work on content and high-level concerns in their writing and thinking processes.