At the very start of Toby Fulwiler's study on the revision process appropriately titled "A Lesson in Revision," I was asked as the reader to think about my own attitudes toward "required revision." After being prompted to think about this, I immediately thought of the undergraduate course that I was required to take when beginning my job at the Center for Writing during my junior year of my undergrad experience. Carrying the intimidating title EngL 3751W "The Theory and Practice of Writing Consultancy," and weighing in at a heavy 4 credits, my instructor (who was also my new boss as assistant director at the Center for Writing) required something of her new employees and students that was completely new to me at the time: what she termed "radical revision." As I sat in Day 1 of this class, more or less meeting my boss and colleagues for the first time, considering the intense 4 credit work load, and considering that my success in the course would greatly influence my success with my new job, I remember shaking in my boots. To make matters worse, there was this new term that I've never really heard of, let alone have been expected to learn, understand, and apply before. "Radical revision? What the hell does that mean?" I remember stressing out about to myself. "I don't really revise to begin with, let alone radically revise! If normal revision is so intense for me, how intense is radical revision going to be? Help me Tom Cruise!" (If you don't get the reference, watch Talladega Nights).
This is when I began to scheme. "I could write a crappy first draft," I remember pondering to myself. "Or, I could just go through, change some word choices around, very some sentence structures, and done." As Harper cites in her article "The Writer's Toolbox: Five Tools for Active Revision Instruction," until taught, many, if not all, students understand "the revision process as a rewording activity" (193). She goes on to state that students "lacked a set of strategies to help them identify the 'something larger' that they sensed was 'wrong' with their writing" (193). Prior to entering EngL 3751W, this is exactly where my understanding of revision stood. My concept of revision was to either 1.) half-ass the first draft so that it looked like I changed a bunch of stuff around by the final draft and/or 2.) make simple, surface level changes to the wording, sentence structures, and so on to the text. However, by radical revision, both my instructor/boss, as well as most likely Harper, have much more than simply attending to the surface level in mind.
Harper continues to discuss that the writer's/reviser's toolbox consists of creating a "common language" of "easily accessible options for getting their jobs done in writing" (193). Similarly, throughout his book titled After THE END: Teaching and Learning Creative Revision (where Harper borrows the majority of her article's material from), Barry Lane discusses creating a "shared language of craft" and finding a "commonality of language" to enable students to revise (129). In other words, just as engineers, machinists, carpenters, and other professions have their shared languages of crafts, or what we might call "jargon," that other "insiders/experts" in the industry immediately understand and apply between each other, English classrooms need to create, understand, and apply their own writing process jargons to teach effective revision. Although Barry Lane and Harper spend a large amount of energy discussing their shared languages of craft consisting of questioning, snapshots, thoughtshots, exploding/shrinking a moment, and making a scene, it is our duties as English/writing teachers to consistently revise, add to, and teach this shared language of craft.
Although EngL 3751 didn't introduce me to the exact tools as discussed by Harper and Lane, I quickly realized that I needed to radically revise my own concept of revision in order to grow as a writer and teacher. Where I previously restricted my revisions to the surface most levels of my writing, I quickly realized that this is not what my new instructor/boss was after. Instead, by radical revision, she expected our writing to evolve on the deep, meaning level. Although she didn't introduce us to the tools/jargon of snapshots and thoughtshots, we did begin to build our own shared language of craft within the class. For example, when radically revising either our own work or our students' work, we were taught to always start with "global concerns/issues" (meaning, clarity, structure…), and then gradually move on to "local concerns/issues" (spelling, grammar, punctuation…). After learning this shared language of craft, my concept of revision was completely turned on its head as I had previously started with local issues, and then rarely, if ever, moved on to the global issues that actually influenced the meaning and purpose of my writing. As I began to learn this new language of craft and jargon, the idea of radical revision that scared the hell out of me at the begging of the class seemed completely manageable. "So this is it?" I thought to myself. "This is all? This is what I was so worried about?" Although learning how to start with the global and move to the local felt extremely awkward and difficult at first, through continued practiced it has become part of my natural process; the goal of any writing instruction.
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To jump out of my personal anecdote surrounding the idea of required revision, I feel as though my personal experience with this concept has given me the ability to truly understand and empathize with students who fear revision and do not yet understand its creative/uncovering possibilities. To ease their stress and make revision an effective process and tool for them to learn, use, and carry with them for the rest of their lives, it is absolutely essential that we as teachers continue to use, build, and revise a shared language of craft in our classroom communities. Doing so completely demystifies the process and eventually renders such a daunting, awkward, and difficult task as a second nature skill transferable to ALL other writing.
However, I have some rather large questions/concerns surrounding creating this shared language of craft in and across our classrooms:
- Because the concept of revision, as well as the writing process as a whole, is so idiocentric, varying from student to student, teacher to teacher, classroom to classroom, school to school, and so on…
- How can we possibly create a unified, universally understandable language of craft? I
- If this were possible, is this what we would even want to do?
- Although potentially beneficial, would creative that unified of language, similar to the unified and universal jargons of other professions/institutions, be dangerous?
- Would it "kill" and/or stifle writing?
- How can we possibly create a unified, universally understandable language of craft? I
- Similarly, how, do we create, contribute to, and revise this language of craft without "institutionalizing" the writing process, as well as writing in general?
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Resources
- English Companion: where English teachers meet to help each other.
- The title of this resource literally speaks for itself. Jumping on the social networking bandwagon, this is a social networking sight dedicated to English teachers. Once you create a profile and log in, you are exposed to a huge number of resources including, but not limited to lesson plans/planning, examples of students' multimedia projects, news related to upcoming ed. events from across the country, access to education blogs and forums, employment opportunities, and the list goes on and on… I'm still exploring it myself. Have fun making friends with other teachers!
1 comment:
"This is when I began to scheme. 'I could write a crappy first draft,' I remember pondering to myself. 'Or, I could just go through, change some word choices around, very some sentence structures, and done.'"
Rick! This is just what I used to do starting in maybe 5th grade, when The Vermont Writing Program began requiring drafts but not explaining what they were or what revision meant. Plus, at that time, from my own reading, I thought writers did everything in one draft--Harriet the Spy's journal entries made it straight to the book; Leo Lionni's Frederick (a mouse) recited several stanzas of perfect rhymes aloud for the first time to the reader (and for his appreciative family, who thereafter immediately dubbed him "a poet"); and Roald Dahl's books always seemed to end with a sort of "so-and-so thought this was a great story, so that is what you have just finished reading." (See the last lines of James and the Giant Peach:
"And because so many of [James's friends] were always begging him to tell and tell again the story of his adventures on the peach, he thought it would be nice if one day he sat down and wrote it as a book.
So he did.
And that is what you have just finished reading." (153-54))
In other words, a story was something you just "sat down and wrote"--not only that, but no sooner did you decide to do so than you actually went ahead and did it. And you did it quite simply, and because it was the logical next step ("So he did"). Stories were done, always-already (gag--sorry, my grad education is repeating on me) finished.
So between thinking that real writers didn't change anything, and getting a lot of feedback from my mother on word choice, I understood writing as a one-shot deal, with "revision" only a matter of choosing better (more precise) individual words to sub in for the generic ones. This, of course, conflicted with my good-student desire to Do What My Teachers Wanted (and not to question authority*), so I wrote drafts with planned obsolescence in mind: I wrote a draft with intentional spelling errors, or words I knew were wrong so I could correct them later in the "second" "draft." (This seems similar to your feelings in 3751W, when you wanted to be seen as a good student/employee.)
I guess all of this is to say that students' previous experiences with reading, and their prior images of what a writer is and does--that is, their assumptions about what writing is, and their knowledge (or lack thereof) about the point in the process at which readers see published writing--also will affect their inclination and ability to revise.
Dahl, Roald. James and the Giant Peach. New York: Bantam Skylark, 1978. [Yes, I am a nerd who wrote an MLA-style citation at the end of a comment.]
*Upon seeing the phrase "QUESTION AUTHORITY" on the t-shirt of a sort of bad-ass string bass player in my youth orchestra, I thought it meant she considered herself the one to ask when you wondered about something--she was the question authority.
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