SQR 3

Leonardo Avila
Eng. 1301.28
Trang Phan
9/12/10

Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”
CCC 31.4 (1980): 378-88

Summary

Sommars’s article shows how many forms of writing processes were through research but they all seem to ignore research on revision. She demonstrates how some form of today’s linear writing processes fail to take into account the revision portions of writing a paper. Sommers used a case study to get an approach of what it was that student and experienced writers did when they revised their papers. Sommers noticed that the majority of the students would not “use the terms revision or rewriting.” The students seemed to use words such as “Scratching out and cutting out” or “Marking Out” when they referred to revising a paper. It appeared that students believed that by either changing a word and/or phrase would make their paper seem better and considered a finished product. When Sommers studied the way experienced writers revised their paper she came to a much different situation. The experience writers seemed to always use “structural expressions such as “finding a framework,” “a pattern,” or “a design for their argument”. Experienced writers would view and describe the revision process as a recursive one with “different levels or cycles”. If students would “seek the dissonance of discovery”, they could very well understand what must be done during the revision process.

Question

In the early years of your education, did you ever revise your papers as the students writers in the article did?

Response

To tell the truth I did. I suppose that almost every essay that I ever did in high school mainly involved me either using different words or changing phrases when I would revise my paper. The reason I would do this I guess was more or less because I found it very useful in a way where I didn’t have the felling that I completely changed what I was writing about. I guess you can say that I’m somewhat arrogant in the fact that I believe that when I finish a paper its perfect even though it’s just the draft, apart from the grammar error which I’m sure I could’ve made. The only times I consider revising my paper is when I turn the essay in and our teachers would say to fix all errors we made. (I would not revise at all when we as a class would use peer response. Mainly because I did not care what they had to say due to the fact, they had less experience than our teachers did.) I would revise the paper, but found myself in a state of utmost difficulty because I had no idea what to change apart from grammar errors. I would turn in what I thought would be a revised essay. My teachers would look at my papers and see that I made very little changes. I suppose one of the reasons I would not revise was because of the lack of motivation I had to do things, which teachers asked. My teachers would always tell me that I would make great essays and wish I could write more, but I did not know how. I guess it is because my mind works like a car with no driver. It runs in only one direction and only when the driver ( I guess its my conscience) is in the car do I know what direction I am going and that’s when I’m able to write, but when my teachers tell my to revise it the driver is gone or has at least bailed out of the car. Therefore, I could not really go more in depth with my essay and discover what it was that I was writing about like the experience writers and only do what the student writers did.