Do you have your students revise their essays? If so, is their process mostly a matter of adding some commas and correcting spelling errors — or are they actually rethinking their writing to make it clearer and stronger?
In this post our guest blogger Lionel Anderson, assistant director of the Office of Academic Resources at Haverford College and a board member of TeenSHARP, offers advice to bridge the gap between the demands of high school and college writing by teaching students the importance of a rigorous revision process.
How do you teach students this skill? Tell us below.
— The Learning Network
Get Ready for College Writing by Learning to Revise
By Lionel Anderson
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, one of my professors demanded four revisions of the same paper — one semester-long revision process for one measly grade.
Sadistic as it was, the five iterations revealed shocking habits in our early drafts. Weight Watchers before-and-after photos had nothing on drafts one and five. She taught us the vast distance between first attempts and a finished product.
At Haverford, as at many colleges and universities, first-year students all take writing-intensive seminars. The courses are as varied as they are rigorous, as you can see by scanning this year’s list.
Prof. Barbara Hall, who teaches a first-year seminar called “Perspectives on Immigration and Education in the United States,” tells her students on day one that she’s going to push them as writers, strip what’s familiar — and then push a whole lot more.
“In most cases, students arrive at colleges as one-draft writers and need to be taught that process-oriented writing often calls for massive revision,” she says.
Should this kind of writing start earlier, I asked her? Can high school teachers in all subject areas oppose the dark forces of texting, tweeting and Facebooking to prepare teenagers for revision-rich writing ahead of their freshman year?
“Of course! And it can be fun,” she answered.
Below, some specific suggestions for how to do it.
Assign fewer papers, but more drafts.
Many college professors would not only agree with this advice, but also apply it to their own writing.
In a recent Times Room for Debate forum about essay writing, for example, J. Elizabeth Clark, a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, writes:
Good writing is a developmental process, one that immerses students in the practice of working as a writer. They wrestle with feedback from peers and their instructors; they learn to self-evaluate; they use these critiques to revise and rewrite. They compose in a digital world, demonstrating mastery of effective communication in 21st century academic, social and professional environments. My colleagues and I assess every part of the writing process, not just an end product. For this 300-word essay, I consulted 11 colleagues and wrote several drafts, because that’s how real writing works.
But what is a revision? Though herding unruly commas and semicolons is essential, Haverford’s Professor Hall points out that “a first draft plus proofreading does not equal a final draft.” Students need to know the difference between editing and proofreading. She describes editing as a careful review for logical consistency, strength of argument, and structural coherence — and doesn’t advocate close proofreading until later drafts.
Are questions resolved? Your position(s) well defended? Did you follow the prompt? Is there clarity? Have your students answer these questions early and often.
Ideas:
- Host a writing clinic to delineate the differences between proofreading and editing.
- Create a grading rubric that prioritizes editing and revision.
- Award extra credit to students who revise and resubmit old papers from a previous semester or quarter.
- Consider assigning shorter forms of writing that lead up to a final paper — or even replace it. The Times article “Blogs vs. Term Papers” describes how “blog writing has become a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses” in universities across the country.
Teach students to plan time for revision.
The writer Nora Ephron, who died in 2012, wrote an essay for The Times in 1986 called “Revision and Life: Take It From the Top — Again.” In it, she admits she was once a one-draft writer:
When I was in college, I revised nothing. I wrote out my papers in longhand, typed them up and turned them in. It would never have crossed my mind that what I had produced was only a first draft and that I had more work to do; the idea was to get to the end, and once you had got to the end you were finished.
Paul Farber, who teaches Haverford’s first-year seminar “Borders, Walls and Bridges: Cultural Approaches to Divided Cities,” has some advice for freshmen who might feel the same way:
“Anticipate that you will have a revision process. If you write with the awareness that you could eventually build on your original draft, you can more productively incorporate feedback from a professor, trusted writing partner, or follow up with your own ideas as they evolve. When you complete a draft, and then immediately print it out to submit without any plan for revision, this most often works to your disadvantage.”
Idea:
- Have students observe their own writing, proofreading and editing process and record the average time spent completing assignments. Then, have them consciously build in more revision time. Dr. Farber suggests that “even taking a few minutes or hours between draft completion and editing will allow you to see your writing from a new perspective. Sometimes a change in location or reading your paper aloud accomplishes that same critical distance.”
Help students understand that there isn’t one unbreakable list of writing rules.
For many high school students, writing papers has mostly been about following a teacher’s rules to get a good grade. But not all the writing guidelines one learns in high school necessarily translate to the discipline-specific nature of college writing.
“Writing to rules limits the tools students can bring to developing their arguments,” Professor Hall says. “They’re too concerned with ‘breaking rules’ and not concerned enough with doing everything possible to develop stronger arguments for their points.”
Ideas:
- Share with students some of the ideas from professional essayists, novelists, journalists, linguists and more in this Learning Network post, “Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well.”
- Have students list seven or eight rules they associate with formal writing. (For example, never beginning a sentence with “and,” “but” or “or”; structuring a five-paragraph essay with an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion; never using the first person; etc.)
- Then, invite them to carefully review some formal “real world” writing, like the four Times articles below, noting where the author employs or abandons those rules. How well did the rule-breaking work?
- “As Not Seen on TV”
- “A Saint, He Ain’t”
- “Hip-Hop à la Française”
- “Should Young Athletes Be Screened for Heart Risk?”
Give writers readers.
Many high school teachers already have students peer-edit essays. This helps them develop an editor’s eye, teaches them that writing is not just a solitary activity and exposes them to good practices they might emulate.
But not all high school teachers realize many college professors employ this practice, too.
“Encourage your students to assemble a team of readers and to be a reader for others,” Professor Hall recommends. The peer-editing process, she says, “develops the critical lens and repositions them as ‘knowers.’ ”
Idea:
- On the question of what kinds of feedback to give writers, students and teachers alike might read the 2013 Times article “You’ve Been Doing a Fantastic Job. Just One Thing …,” which explains that giving feedback isn’t as simple as we might think.
- Research shows that “when people are experts on a subject, or consider themselves experts, they’re more eager to hear negative feedback, while those novices are more likely to seek positive responses.” After reading the article, teachers might ask students to note what kind of feedback helps them most.
Above all, however, learning how to revise is a personal process.
“Figure out what works best for you,” Dr. Farber tells students. “The more self-aware you are about what helps you improve upon previous drafts, or what scares you about returning to work in progress, the more you can adjust to a routine that is proper for you.”
(This post, by the way? It went through at least 20 revisions.)
As a teenager himself, Mr. Anderson was a New York Times Scholar; later he wrote for The Times’s Choice blog. You can follow him on Twitter.
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