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Drafting and Revising
Many writing instructors recommend that students complete a first draft that focuses primarily on ideas and clarifying their purpose for writing. In later revisions, more attention can be given to audience, development, additional research, organization, and coherence. While this staging of “what to pay attention to” is by no means fixed, the wisdom behind such recommendations is that writers can only focus their attention in so many directions at once. Breaking down the task can help writers focus on one of the many issues writers need to consider. Thus, it can be useful to require an initial draft early on in the process, allowing writers more time to revise, and to devise revision activities that help them focus on the quality of their ideas, their writing, and their ability to communicate with a specified audience.
Revision Activities
Revising one’s writing is one of the most difficult things to do as it’s easy to think one’s first draft already hits the mark or that revising may involve more work with little better result. As all of us know from our own writing, sometimes the latter can be true as we return to an earlier version after substantial revision. But we also are more assured that we have considered other options and that our suspicion that the first draft (or more likely, a part of the first draft) was effective is the right one. Student writers, however, frequently choose the first draft for lack of other options, needing encouragement to “re-see” their writing in order to make it stronger. One way to encourage revision is to “scaffold” an assignment so that each new revision provides a new task. Another is to require students to take part in revision activities that will draw their attention to certain goals of the assignment, such as audience awareness or genre norms. The key with any revision activity is to help writers view their papers in a new light, either by analyzing an aspect that may have not received enough attention, evaluating the essay’s effectiveness, or reconsidering the content from a new perspective. A few, generic revision activities are included below, but the best activities are specific to a given assignment.
Descriptive Outlines
Frequently, when drafting, organization falls by the wayside as our own ideas and our content move the essay along rather than any logical choice about order. One way to get students to examine the logic behind their organization is to ask them to outline the essay after it’s drafted, which provides a new way of seeing their essay in microcosm.
Have students divide a piece of paper into three columns. Ask them to number each paragraph on their papers and describe, in the first column, what the paragraph “says”: i.e. the gist of the content. Once completed, ask them to write the thesis or purpose of their essay on the top of the sheet, then for each paragraph, they should describe each paragraph’s content in relation to the purpose of the essay: i.e. what does the content do? Finally, in the third column, ask them to look at the relationship between paragraph 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and so on and describe the relationship in writing between each paragraph. Upon completion, ask students first to examine column 1: where are they discussing similar content? Do any paragraphs need to be moved? In column two, ask them to return to the paper to see if the relationship between a paragraph and the essay’s purpose is included for the reader. If not, ask them to rewrite topic sentences to help connect the paragraph to the paper’s overall purpose. Finally, with column three, ask them to consider the logic of the order. If there is no clear reason why one paragraph follows another, should it be moved? Is the reason apparent to readers? If not, would a better transition help?
Audience Analysis
Ask students to consider the needs of the audience they are writing for, perhaps in a class discussion. Brainstorm the audience’s expectations, what they already know on a topic, and what new information or perspective they are most likely to be receptive and opposed to. With this analysis in hand, students then read their own drafts (or each others’) and write a response (perhaps as a letter to the editor) that illustrates their reactions to, questions about, and objections to the paper’s content.
Research Assessment
Frequently students will include too much research in a paper, such that their own perspective gets lost, or too little research in the assumption that their ideas do not need support. One way to help writers examine their use of research is a simple exercise using different colored highlighters. They use one color to highlight all information they derived from sources (quotes, summaries, paraphrases) and another for everything they deem to be their own idea, interpretation, argument, or perspective. Once coded, it is often surprising how much of the paper is highlighted in only one color, giving writers an idea of whether revision is best focused on further research or making clearer how they want readers to interpret the research they are using.
Altering the Perspective
Many times writers are encouraged to consider other, perhaps more effective options for writing only if forced to do so. Some instructors assign a second draft written for an entirely different audience, in another genre, or with a different purpose to help students re-see the content of their piece. Many times, a portion of this experiment may find its way into the final revision as writers include new examples, argue against a perspective they hadn’t considered, or creatively incorporate some elements from another genre.
Revision and Feedback
As most of us have experienced with colleagues or editors, probably the most effective way to encourage revision is by having someone else read and respond to your work. Teacher feedback can be essential at this stage, but feedback strategies are quite different than when grading a piece of writing and should focus on options for what a student might do to improve a draft, questions about content, arguments with ideas, and reasons (in terms of purpose and audience) for suggestions. In short, the same type of response we might desire when a work is still in progress and not yet ready to be evaluated.
Many of us, however, do not have time to respond to every draft we require, thus peer response is a wonderful alternative, and frequently a more effective one as students are less likely to see response from peers as “directions” and are thus more likely to revise based on their own decisions about how to interpret feedback.
Revision and Reflection
Although not revising per se, another effective way to help students re-see their work is to ask them, in writing, to reflect on why they wrote a particular essay in the way they did, or why they made certain revisions between drafts in terms of their own assessment of their purpose in writing and their audience’s needs. Between drafts, it’s also helpful to ask students to list 2-3 other options for how they might have written the draft and why they rejected those options. Such reflective writing does two things:
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it makes writers stop and consider their essays as something they deliberately crafted (and thus something that may be re-crafted), and
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it helps writers consider that other options are available.
Finally, looking at these reflections as part of grading can also help you with commenting by providing a better sense of what the writer was thinking when constructing the essay, and thus what advice might be most useful.
Updated September 3, 2008
