Talking About Revision

by Brianne Holmes

Brianne Holmes, 2014

How do we describe revision? What ideas about revision are we developing and trying to pass on to students? I wanted to know, so I read work by scholars and PhD candidates.

I’ll also consider how these views of revision might affect blocking in the revision stage, or as I like to call it, revision block.

Brianne Holmes

So tell me, what is revision?

Kenneth M. Gillam, 2005

“‘[R]evision,’at least in broad terms, refers to students’ abilities to re-think, re-write and improve their papers on a variety of levels of content and structure, regardless of, or at least postponing, editing and proofreading” (4).

Wesley Davis, 1988

“Freshman writers must realize that composing is often a messy, recursive process based on rhetorical awareness, out of which clear and correct prose evolves through revision” (1).

Elizabeth Kleinfeld, 2006

“Excessive revision is revision that fully explores possibilities in a draft and their consequences rather than prioritizing movement toward focus, unity, and surface perfection” (4).

Lisa A. Costello, 2011

“Most composition theory concurs that revision is a key element in the writing process, and in order to improve writing substantially, students must learn to do more than surface editing. In deep revision, students reconceptualizetheir ideas and structures, achieving one of the primary learning outcomes of most writing programs – high levels of critical thinking.”

Nancy Sommers, 1980

“Such Blindness, as I discover with student writers, is the inability to ‘see’ revision as a process: the inability to ‘re-view’ their work again, as it were with different eyes, and to start over” (382).

Brianne Holmes

So, to review, students are being asked to do some or all of the following in revision: re-see, think rhetorically, make their drafts “evolve” into clarity, plumb the depths of their drafts’ potential, overhaul concepts and ideas and rhetorical frameworks, rewrite, and even start over.

But do students understand that these are the expectations? Are students and teachers on the same page? Some say no.

David L. Wallace and John R. Hayes, 1991

“When teachers assign revision tasks, they typically hope that students will set the same goals, make use of the same procedures, and apply the same criteria for success. However, considerable evidence suggests that many freshman students define revision very differently from their teachers” (55).

Barbara Tomlinson, 1988

“Essentially, we tend to lump together as revision a variety of processes that have little more in common than timing – they occur after some initial decisions, statements, efforts at text” (75).

Brianne Holmes

Okay, so maybe students are confused about what we want them to do when we tell them to revise. This confusion could lead to indecision, panic, procrastination, and other manifestations of writer’s block. On the other hand, teacher and writer Nancy Welch doesn’t think students misunderstand us – she thinks students understand we’re talking drastic revision (232-233), the kind described by Sommers, Davis, Gillam, Kleinfeld, and Costello.

So, why else might these students experience revision block?

Kenneth M. Gillam

In Writer’s Block: The Cognitive Dimension, Mike Rose calls writing “recursive,” and “opportunistic” borrowing the former term from Flower and Hayes and the latter from Heyes-Roths (8-11). Writing is often non-linear. The writer may shift between editing, organizing, generating new ideas, rewording, etc. Thus, writing may not follow a clear prewriting-writing-revision model.

“[W]riting cannot always be produced methodically and systematically, even according to a writing ‘process’ taught in temporal sequence” (5).

Mike Rose, 1984

If we force a prewriting-writing-revision process, will this create a false rule that leads to revision block?

“Blocking can occur if assumptions, strategies or certain kinds of rules, plans, and frames hold a writer too rigidly to a top-down or bottom-up orientation or in some other way restrict opportunistic play” (11).

One more theory: Revision block occurs because students fear

for their lives.

Roseanne Bane, 2012

Okay, not exactly. But sort of. In her book Around the Writer’s Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer’s Resistance, Roseanne Bain says that when we fear something – including writing – a particular system in our brain kicks in. This system is designed to save our lives in dangerous situations. The bad news is this life-saving system also inhibits creativity. It makes us want to fight or flee, not write.

“Fighting…can include refusing to hear suggestions for revision…denying the need for improvement, damning the whole system” (29-30).

Brianne Holmes

So, if students feel threatened by the task of revision, their bodies’ life-saving systems may be activated. This will inhibit their ability to revise.

Why would students feel threatened? Only because we’ve run their writing through our critical lens and asked them to re-see, to re-invent, even to start over.

Which might leave them feeling like this…

Works Cited

Bain, Roseanne. Around the Writer’s Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Write’s Resistance. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.

Costello, Lisa A. “The New Art of Revision? Research Papers, Blogs, and the First-Year Composition Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two Year College 39.2 (Dec., 2011): 151-167. ProQuest. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Davis, Wesley K. “Strategies and Rhetorical Considerations in Freshman Writing.” Conference on the Freshman Year Experience. 4-6 Dec. 1988, Columbia, SC. ERIC. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Gillam, Kenneth M. “Toward an Ecology of Revision: A Revision Model of Chaos and Cooperation.” Illinois State University: UMI Microfilm, 2005. ProQuest. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Hayes, John R. and David L. Wallace. “Redefining Revision for Freshmen.” Research in the Teaching of English25.1 (Feb., 1991): 54-66. National Council of Teachers of English. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Works Cited cont.

Kleinfeld, Elizabeth. “Dissonance and Excess: Four Students’ Experiences of Revision in a Composition Classroom.” Illinois State University: UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2006. ProQuest. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Rose, Mike. Writer’s Block: The Cognitive Dimensions. Carbundale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Print.

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec., 1980): 378-388. National Council of Teachers of English. Web. 2 Nov. 2009.

Tomlinson, Barbara. “Tuning Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision.” Written Communication 5.1 (Jan., 1988): 58-81. SAGE Journals. Web. 14 Nov. 2014.

Welch, Nancy. “Toward an Excess-ive Theory of Revision.” Teaching Composition: Background Readings, Eds. T.

R. Johnson & Shirley Morahan. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.