Revision and rewriting are taboo words for many students even in in higher education. Sommers identifies that most students look at revision strategies as a rewording activity and generally see it as a negative punishment or consequence for not doing a good job on their first try. Sommers looks at the grammatical aspects of revision and how people view it as “lexical changes instead of semantic changes”.
Method:
While I could not force my housemates to write multiple essays to study, I thought learning about their views on revision would be quite interesting given the diversity of the house in both age and areas of study. For the research I interviewed a computer science, econ, environmental science, and accounting major. Like Sommers my goal was to frame the question in an unbiased way so they could give their true responses and not be influenced by what I said. The question I asked over the past week to each one of my housemates individually was, “what is the process of getting a paper back and having to work on it again before turning it in for a new grade called?” While this is an incredibly awkward sentence, it was the best I could come up with that did not use and of the terms that Sommers had already outlined. After interviewing 6 people these were the terms that came up and the descriptions of them.
Results:
Re-do – This was the main term used by the senior econ major. He took the his revision process to the letter of how Adler-Kassner and Wardle argue all students should respond to revision in Naming What we Know, “If I’m given extra time to make my essay better even if it’s only for a small chance at a better grade I’m going to re-do it and try and make it better so I can also become a better writer.” The process of re-doing essays for him was headlined by making arguments more fleshed out at points and trying to figure out where he could be more concise at other. Additionally he tries to look back at the prompt to see if anything can be added like outside research or other sources to go above and beyond what the prompt calls for (I have lived with this kid for 4 years and I was just as shocked as you are probably reading this).
Revise (2) – Junior econ major and sophomore computer science major both called the process Reviving or Revision. They then described this process as looking to strengthen your arguments and adding maybe a paragraph while also looking to clean up grammatical mistakes. Along with this description both students generally thought that this was a positive thing either because they would be able to get a better grade or they could make their writing better.
Rewrite (2) – The environmental science and accounting majors, both seniors, chose this as their preferred term. Rewriting included looking at the structure of the essay and trying to change around the order to make the essay “flow” better. The environmental science major said he was neutral toward rewriting and explained, “if it needed to be done then fine, but I’d prefer not to have to do it.” Even though he said he was neutral toward rewriting this seems to be more of a negative stance that is not open to learning from previous mistakes to make the final writing more impressive. However, the econ major pointed out that the rewrite was an opportunity to fix mistakes and a “lifeline” from the professor to get a better grade so he was much more positive.
Doing it Over – A senior finance major decided that the process was called doing it over and he was the most negative towards the revision, “If I have to do a paper over again I would be pissed. It’s basically like the last one was worthless and I wasted my time.” He continued to describe how he has never had a class where revisions were a good thing and it happened only when people did so poorly that the teacher needed another attempt at the essay to even count it for credit. He described the process as throwing the entire last essay out and starting from scratch; sometimes even rethinking his thesis or the material he was writing on. Even asking him these follow up questions seemed to bring up bad memories and make him upset.
Discussion:
This reworking of the research done by Sommers actually really surprised me. I thought my housemates would tend to be just as negative toward revision as I am (even though I am learning to like it more thanks to this class). However the majority of them had very positive responses to having to re-do, rewrite, or revise an essay. I think some of their thinking could have been influenced by their majors. Both econ majors were positive toward revision and because I am also an econ major I can see the logic in wanting to rewrite something because there is a value to doing so that you are not only getting from the opportunity of a higher grade but value in bettering yourself. I was also surprised in how extensive their revision processes were. Going into the questions I asked them, I believed most people would say that they just look to clean up grammar and maybe add a few sentences and quotes here and there to make things look better and have proof of “doing something to show the professor” (because that’s what I used to think of revision). However it is interesting to see that most of them are looking to grow as writers even though none of them are traditional English majors and many of them work primarily with number or writing in code.