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.
