In the fall of 2019, I began teaching first-year college composition at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, MI. My classroom was in a former high school building on the main campus; being an older classroom, there were only two chalkboards and a small whiteboard, the latter behind the projector screen, to work with, and the static rows of heavy, unmovable desks made group activities difficult as well. My students were first-year college students, mostly freshmen and mostly from local or nearby towns in Michigan or neighboring states, with two or three non-traditional students thrown in the mix as well.
The most challenging concept I taught during that semester—challenging for the students to grasp as well as challenging in finding ways to produce practicable and valuable results—was the process of revision. For the course, we are required to teach to a set of core principles, one of which is the Writing Process, including revision strategies and an opportunity to revise each assigned essay. I think revision is a difficult method for any writer to determine and often is something every writer needs to consider and discover for him- or herself.
This raises two issues in the first-year composition course. First, my students don’t see themselves as real writers, only as students taking a required GenEd class. For the most part, especially with the younger students, they don’t believe they have a promising voice or a perspective worth writing from. Starting from this premise, the writing process becomes a battlefield of white-paper dotted with mines of unknown and/or misunderstood writing rules, such as paragraphs and sentence structures, grammar and punctuation. Writing anything, even prewriting sometimes, can be a stressful or at least unwelcome endeavor.
This leads into the second issue with teaching revision: lack of motivation. For many students, it seems once it’s written, it’s written. They’re not interested in seeing how it could be improved because they don’t see the worth in it already! Even if revision is included in the final grade, once they’ve put a burst of effort into the first draft, especially after multiple prewriting exercises, they don’t want to expend any more effort on revision.
Aiming to improve this mentality, I began this semester by having every student a text-based topic they will study in various ways throughout the semester. This way, I hope they will feel more inclined and less pressured to write about something “the professor” thinks they should write about, and instead, choose a topic they truly care about on a more personal level. Hopefully the first drafts I receive from this group of students will be more personally-motivated than before. I hope this will also lead to a greater expectancy on the students’ part to produce strong and well-informed essays, and to revise them until they are simply because they truly care about what they’re writing about.
This semester I have also allotted two weeks instead of one between the first and final draft due dates. This will allow us to have multiple in-class revision workshops in small groups and individually as well as three one-on-one conferences with me (one after each first draft is due) to act as a diving board into each student’s unique revision process. Having movable desks and chairs will certainly help create a more fluid workshop environment this semester, as will streamlining multiple revision strategies toward each final draft.
While difficult to say how well certain revision strategies work, seeing as they are each a subjective part of an already-subjective writing process, I did receive better responses from my previous students after I guided them through an index-card reverse outline exercise as well as certain other group workshops. For the most part, the feedback they gave me was “we felt too rushed” and “we could have used more time.” Taking this into account, I’ve done my best to reserve entire class periods for revision this semester, especially for group workshops. I should remember that revision often takes the longest in my own writing process, so I shouldn’t expect students’ revision processes, let alone group workshops, to be a quick and simple process.
Lastly, I’m considering a handout with a list of revision strategies that I’ll ask my students to use when revising their papers this semester. I’d ask them to select at least three of the revision suggestions on the sheet (e.g., rewrite your introduction paragraph using a different technique, rearrange your body paragraphs, remove ten unnecessary sentences and add five new necessary ones), and use them to revise their paper in those specific ways. Revision does not mean perfection, but I think students assume it does. My goal with this clear-cut revision requirement would be to show students that a revision is just another draft in a potentially-long line of drafts; it doesn’t have to be the final draft. A first-year composition class should give students many opportunities to try out different writing strategies, especially ones they might not have considered before, and revision can simply be another exercise in re-trying their essay (the French word for “try”) without the fear of failing.
Jessica Hudson; Northern Michigan University;