In 1989, a long time ago, as I entered my fourth year as a teacher, I decided to share some of my writing with my first-year composition class. My aim in doing this was pedagogical. I wanted to demonstrate how my own writing process could lead me to better writing. Since I was teaching writing as a process, I was particularly interested in modeling revision for them. They were not into revising. For their first essays, every student showed that he or she was practiced at writing one draft as though it would be the final draft and, except for a little line editing and the changing of a word here and there, handing it in. I wanted them to see how worthwhile not just editing a few lines but actually revising ones thoughts could be.
To do this, I chose a point in the semester at which my students had finished the first draft of their second paper. After I had them sign up for conferences to meet with them after I read and commented on their work, I shared the first full draft of an editorial I was working on. It was an actual draft I was honing, one I hoped would appear in one of the local newspapers at the time. I was trying to get some opinion pieces in newspapers–this was all pre-internet and pre-blogger-sphere. My piece was also somewhat close to the genre of argumentative writing my students were doing in class. So I saw it as an occasion for me to model problems with issues like having a clear, interesting thesis, anticipating opposing views and treating them fairly, and then supporting my own claims. I also hoped they’d see evidence of my voice deepening as I revised my work.
They were with me through the first draft. They saw me modeling some of the features of classical adversarial argument, with one concession thrown in to disarm the opposition a bit. They made a few comments and I wrote them on the chalk board, took note of them. Most of them had to do with word choice, and one student mentioned that a comma was in the wrong place (it wasn’t). I talked about their comments and said that I would consider them, and then I talked about what had troubled me about the draft and how I wanted to improve it. I pushed them toward revision as rethinking and re-seeing. Then I read the second draft. And that’s when the pedagogy collapsed.
The second draft was worse than the first, they said. No, no, this wasn’t right.
I was puzzled. Hadn’t I prepared them for this? Hadn’t I suggested that I was going after a stronger account of my topic, one that I’d only hinted at in my formal first draft?
That didn’t seem to matter. There were a set of expectations here that I hadn’t addressed. Each revision should lead to greater, not lesser clarity. Each revision should move the piece closer to perfection, not further away. The journey should be forward, not circuitous and full of questions. To my class, what mattered was that I’d been trying to convince them that revising their essays would make them better, and here, even the teacher had not achieved this. What was the point?
I lost many of them that day. I know now what I should have done. I should have brought the next draft in to show them how it had deepened and moved closer to my goals. But we didn’t have time for that, and I didn’t. But I have since learned to give more room for understanding revision and even tying it to how we learn from our first efforts.
I still think that the demonstration was worth doing, and I’ve learned from it. It made me a better teacher, better at thinking through how to teach basic revision strategies. Now, when I try something like this, I focus on specific acts of addition (of paragraphs, new pages), subtraction (of paragraphs and old pages) and rearranging the order of ideas. I also bring in sheets of brainstorms and freewriting, where I’ve developed paragraphs on the side. I talk about how I often rethink my writing while in the shower or while I’m driving alone. Writing, following Nancy Sommers who did groundbreaking research into students and revision, is never a straight line. It is more organic than that. I’ve tried to suggest that the way forward is sometimes to the side and even going backward. We learn from our failures. I certainly learned from this failure of my pedagogy.
Many of my students today still talk like those first students I had over thirty years ago talked. They want to correct a few commas. They correct a few cases of word choice. They talk of their essays as though they are doing math. They refer to “correcting” their “mistakes” rather than rethinking their first impressions. Deeply imbedded in these math references are telling images of what they think the process is. It is about trying to get everything “correct,” that is, the right sum, the first time. And if you don’t, you have to revise–that is, correct yourself. Revision is a form of punishment for doing something wrong. As one student told me two years ago, only bad writers need to revise.
Tell that to F. Scott Fitzgerald, I wanted to say. Or Hemingway. Or any of the script writers who worked on your favorite movies.
I didn’t say that. But this suggestion of doing things poorly, which leads to the need for revision, is not how I represent writing to them or to myself. Again, I liken it to a tree growing, as Nancy Sommers does, or to a journey. I liken it to having the opportunity to rethink everything. Writing is simply never going to be as neat and summary as basic math, though that is what a lot of people want it to be. Instead, I tell them, it’s more like what my graduate student friends in math were doing, where they were finding many different paths to their solutions as they used math to solve problems in the world around them, not just on a sheet of paper.
When my pedagogy failed to produce clarity for those students, they rejected the whole premise of writing as a series of processes to go through. For this, I have regrets. But I like to think I learned from the process and revised my approach.
Thank you for reading. I’d love to hear how you approach revision.