Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean
their many different goals and rhetorical constraints.
Another contributing factor may be the difficulty of getting a bird's‐eye view of a draft when composing on screen. During the early days of word processing, several researchers (Daiute, 1986; Hawisher, 1987) showed that although word processing facilitates sentence‐level revision as well as some larger‐scale revisions such as additions, deletions, and block moves of text, it may actually discourage major reconceptualizing of a text—the kind of global revision that leads to substantial dismantling and rewriting. By revising from the screen rather than from a hard copy, writers see only narrow windows of their text rather than the whole. Global revision often requires the writer to revisit earlier passages, to compare, for example, a point being made on page 7 with what was forecast on page 2. Such a bird's‐eye overview of a text is easier with hard copy than on screen, where scrolling backward is time‐consuming. (The difference between revising on screen versus paper is analogous to reading on an e‐reader such as Kindle versus on paper, where you can quickly flip to the table of contents, the index, or previous pages.)
Whatever the cause of students' failure to revise, teachers need to create an academic environment that encourages revision. The importance of revision has been highlighted by the NSSE/WPA research on writing assignments that contribute to deep learning (Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, 2015, 2016). This research identifies the presence of “interactive elements” in an assignment as the first of three criteria for best practices. These interactive elements include building into the assignment opportunities for in‐class brainstorming, peer review, teacher feedback on drafts, or visits to a writing center. (See chapter 4 for further discussion of the NSSE/WPA research.)
Fifteen Suggestions for Encouraging Revision
In the spirit of this research, we offer fifteen suggestions for promoting revision by building interactive elements into an assignment or a course.
1 Profess a problem‐driven model of the writing process. Instead of asking students to choose “topics” and narrow them, encourage students to pose questions or problems and explore them. Show how inquiry and writing are related.
2 Give problem‐focused writing assignments. Students are most apt to revise when their essays are responses to genuine problems, whether provided by the teacher or posed by the student. See chapter 4 for advice on creating writing assignments that guide students toward a problem‐thesis structure.
3 Create active learning tasks that help students become posers and explorers of questions. Students need to be seized by questions and to appreciate how the urge to write grows out of the writer's desire to say something new about a question or problem. Through classroom activities that let students explore their own responses to questions, students rehearse the thinking strategies that underlie revision. Chapters 6 through 10 focus on strategies for active learning.
4 Incorporate low‐stakes exploratory writing into your course. Chapter 5 suggests numerous ways to incorporate exploratory writing into a course. Exploratory writing gives students the space, incentive, and tools for more elaborated and complex thinking.
5 Build talk time and writing center conferences into the writing process. Student writers need to talk about their ideas with others by conversing with classmates, friends, or writing center consultants/tutors. Writers need to bounce ideas off interested listeners, to test arguments, to see how audiences react, and to get feedback on drafts. In this regard, consider having students talk through their ideas in small groups before they write their first drafts. On many campuses, the writing center director can arrange for writing center consultants/tutors to conduct tutor‐led brainstorming or draft workshops in class. Also encourage one‐on‐one writing center consultations. One of the most important services offered by writing centers is the opportunity for students to talk through their ideas in the early stages of drafting.
6 Use reflections and other metacognitive strategies to help students self‐assess their own drafts. Recent research has shown how reflective writing can help students develop metacognitive awareness of their own thinking processes. This awareness, in turn, helps writers assess the strengths and weaknesses of a work in progress, to recognize problem areas in a draft, and to plan revision strategies to address them. The more students learn to self‐assess their own drafts (and to assess their peers' drafts during peer reviews), the more they will revise their work without instructor intervention. Chapter 11 treats reflective writing and self‐assessment in more detail.
7 Intervene in the writing process by having students submit something to you. Take advantage of the summarizable nature of thesis‐based writing by having students submit to you their problem proposals, thesis statements, nutshelling statements, or self‐written abstracts. Use these brief pieces of writing to identify persons who need extra help. Much of this work can be done online through electronic bulletin boards or other courseware. See chapter 13 for further details.
8 Build process requirements into the assignment, including due dates for drafts. If students are going to stay up all night before a paper is due, make that an all‐night session for a mandatory rough draft rather than for a finished product.
9 Develop strategies for peer review of drafts, either in class or out of class. After students have completed a rough draft, well in advance of the final due date, have students exchange drafts and serve as readers for each other. See chapter 11 for advice on conducting peer reviews.
10 Hold writing conferences with students, especially for those who are having difficulty with the assignment. Traditionally, teachers in American universities spend more time writing comments on finished products than on holding conferences earlier in the writing process. As a general rule, time spent “correcting” finished products is not as valuable as time spent in conference with students at the rough draft stages. See chapter 13 for suggestions.
11 Allow rewrites or make revision‐oriented comments on near final drafts. Many students are motivated toward revision by the hope of an improved grade. If students have an opportunity to revise an essay after you have made your comments, you will strike a major blow for writing as a process. See chapters 12–15 for advice on writing marginal and end comments that encourage revision rather than cosmetic editing. See chapters 11 and 16 for using self‐assessment, peer reviews, portfolios, and alternative grading methods to promote revision.
12 Bring in examples of your own work in progress so that students can see how you go through the writing process yourself. Students like to know that their teachers also struggle with writing. The more you can show students your own difficulties as a writer, the more you can improve their own self‐images.
13 Recognize how essay exams send wrong signals about writing and revision. Symbolically, essay exams convey the message that writing is a transcription of already clear ideas rather than a means of discovering and making meaning. They suggest that revision is not important and that good writers produce acceptable finished copy in one draft. Although essay exams continue to be a common means of assessment in liberal education, they should not substitute for writing that goes through multiple drafts.
14 Hold to high standards for finished products. Teachers are so used to seeing early drafts as final copy that they often forget how good a globally revised essay can be when teachers demand excellence. Students do not see much point in revision if they can