Author: Peggy Woods

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Celebrating Writing

This time of year I sometimes find it hard not to be crabby. Although it’s almost the middle of April, it’s still cold in the morning, there is still snow in my yard, and the lake still has ice on it. And this time of the semester I also seem focused on what the students aren’t doing—they aren’t coming to class, they aren’t turning their essays in on time, they aren’t doing their Works Cited pages correctly, they aren’t doing their in-text citations correctly, they don’t “get” the essays we are reading from our reader.

And this past week, I’m afraid to admit, I was crabby about organizing the Writing Program’s Celebration of Writing that was held on Sunday—an event where we recognized the undergraduate students who are completing our year-long tutoring course, the winners of our annual Best Text Contest for Basic Writing, College Writing, and Junior-Year Writing, and the students selected to be published in our Student Writing Anthology.  I know. I know. The Celebration of Writing is a good event and this is something that I should not be crabby about, but anyone who has ever organized large events knows that the details that go into the planning of these kinds of events can make anyone cranky.

One of my tasks for the Celebration was to present the Best Text Awards for the College Writing category. Now although as one of the judges I had read all the entries, I decided to re-read the winning essays so I could say something specific about each piece. Once again, I was impressed with these pieces. Not only were they well written, each essay had a strong sense of voice and was truly a pleasure to read. I learned something from each essay I read, and I was moved by each writer’s use of language. As I read, my crabbiness began to fade.

For this year’s Celebration our program consisted of a keynote speaker, Nick McBride from the Department of Journalism, and several students speakers/readers. As I listened to each of our speakers, I realized a theme was emerging. (And since I was one of the organizers I can tell you the theme was unplanned!) Each speaker talked about how through writing they realized that they had a voice and that they had something to say. And, even more importantly, for each of these writers somewhere along the way there was someone who wanted to hear what they had to say.

Currently, I think, there is a lot of discussion and focus on assessment, outcomes, goals, and objectives. Of course, I’m not against all this. But listening to all our speakers discuss the power of finding their voices, the confidence they gained from someone validating what they had to say, and, as Nick told us, that writing can enable us to discover the truth within ourselves, makes me realize that the most important thing that we do in our writing classes is to provide a space for writers to discover themselves.

Our students have fascinating things to say and our writing classrooms provide them with the space to say these things.

And this is what excites me the most as a teacher.

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Seize the Teaching Moment

This week the conversation around campus and the whole Pioneer Valley is the “Blarney Blowout” and its aftermath.  Everyone is talking about it—some are claiming the police are too brutal, some are wondering why the students think it is okay to gather in a large crowd and drink, some are embarrassed by the negative attention this has drawn to our campus, some think everyone is over reacting, some are discussing what the University should have done, should not have done and what the University should do now. Everyone has something to say about this.

As teachers, and especially as teachers of first-year students, this seems like something that we should talk to our students about. But I’m afraid if I bring this up in class the conversation may start out okay, but would take a bad turn, and I would gradually end up sounding like my mother.

Me: “Did any of you go to the Blarney Blowout?”

The students: “It was fun.”

Me: “Fun? What are you talking about? People were arrested.”

The students: “It was fun until the police came and sprayed tear gas and beat people.”

Me: “People were throwing beer cans and ice balls at the police. What did you expect?”

The students: “It was really the police who started everything. It was really about police brutality.”

Me: “You shouldn’t have even been there. With that many people together drinking that early in the day there is bound to be trouble.”

The students: “We have a right to party.”

Me: “Right to party? What are you talking about?”

The students: “We have a right to have fun.”

Me: “What??  You aren’t here for fun. You’re supposed to be studying.  Do you know how much it costs to send you there?”

Okay—maybe not so gradually turning into my mother.

The other day I went to observe Zoe Mungin’s class as she was beginning our “Adding to the Conversation.” This unit asks students to select a conversation (topic), do some research to narrow the topic in order to develop a purpose to communicate to a specific audience.  Zoe began by asking the students about the “Blarney Blowout.” She asked the students what they thought about the weekend and then she let them talk. Her students said the things I’ve heard other students say this week—it wasn’t as bad as the media made it out to be, the police were too violent, if the University hadn’t “warned” students they, as first-year students, never would known about it, etc. She asked questions and more importantly she didn’t turn into my mother. She didn’t judge.

And then Zoe asked the students to think about the “Blarney Blowout” as a conversation.

“What have you read about the blowout?” She asked. “Where did you read it? What was it about? What perspective was it from?”

Again the students talked, but now drawing from a range of online sources. As the students talked, Zoe kept asking questions. She kept pushing. “Remember how we have been talking about credibility? Remember how we have talked about logical and emotional appeals? Is this a logical appeal? How so? Is this credible? How so?”

Soon the class wasn’t just talking about the “Blarney Blowout,” but rather how it was a conversation, a conversation consisting of a range of perspectives, all with different purposes for voicing their opinions.

“There seems to be a lot of different ways of looking at this,” Zoe said. “There also seems to be different issues to focus on here. What’s one issue we can focus on?” Now she was getting the students to narrow the topic.

“Police brutality,” someone said.

“Let’s imagine we would be writing an open letter about ‘Blarney’ focusing on police brutality to a news outlet. Name a news outlet.”

“Fox News,” someone called out.

“Okay, who is the audience for Fox News? What tone would you use? What would this audience expect to hear?”

After the students worked through these questions, Zoe said, “Give me another news outlet. One different from Fox News.”

“Her Campus,” someone else called.

“Okay,” Zoe said. “Who is the audience? How is this audience different from Fox News? What about tone? How would the tone here be different from Fox News?”

In other words, Zoe used the “Blarney Blowout” as a teaching moment. She was able to take something that all the students had an opinion about and turned it into a lesson about narrowing a research topic and the rhetorical situation.

And she also did something else.  By gradually moving “Blarney” from the main topic of discussion to an example to illustrate audience and purpose, Zoe enabled the students to begin seeing the “Blarney Blowout” from different perspectives.

The conversation about “Blarney” seems to be continuing. The University announced yesterday that they have hired former Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis to conduct a review of the University’s and the town of Amherst’s handling of the event.  I also heard this morning on New England Public Radio a very interesting report about “celebratory rioting” that not only broadens the conversation, but puts it into a different context.  It seems that “Blarney” may provide us with even more teaching moments as we move through the rest of the semester.

Please share how you are using this as a teaching moment in your class.

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Putting Students in Motion

“My class seems really quiet this semester. Is there something I can do to get them talking more? Anything I can do to get more energy in my classroom?”

This is a question I’ve been asked frequently this semester. I can understand why the students don’t seem as lively as they did during the fall semester. It’s cold. It’s snowing. And when it hasn’t been snowing, it’s cloudy. This is the perfect weather for staying in, reading a book, watching a movie, watching t.v. Who really wants to bundle up and trudge around campus?  And once our students actually get to our overheated classrooms, it does seem time for a nap.

My answer to this question is simple. Get the students moving. Don’t just let them sit there. Get them up. Get them walking around. This will wake them up and get their blood moving. Put them in groups and make them talk to one another early on. Don’t just let them settle into their chairs. Half-way through class have them get up again and move around. The more active they are the more energy (hopefully) will be in the classroom.

This does seem simple, but I’m going to have to admit something. As a teacher it took me a long time to take my own advice. I used to tell myself that it would take up too much time to ask the students to form groups with students across the room rather than with the people sitting next to them. I used to tell myself that it would be too chaotic to have all these people walking around a small space. It would take too much time to bring the class back together once they had been moving around. In other words, I was afraid of losing control of the class.

Since part of my job is to visit classes, I had observed several of our graduate instructors doing just what I had advised. To form groups, these teachers would have the students select shapes out of a hat and would then have them walk around the room to find the people who matched their shapes. These teachers would have the students do revision exercises that required them to move from station to station within the classroom. Whenever I observed these classes I was always envious of how these teachers were able to get the students out of their seats and interacting with one another. The energy level in the room was always increased. The classroom on the surface may have appeared to be chaotic, but it was clear that everything was under control. I wished I could do this too. But I was still hesitant.

Okay, I was actually afraid.

During my observations I would see teachers with a range of teaching styles. Some would sit at the teacher’s desk, some would sit on the desk, some would sit at a desk in a circle with the students. Some would move around the room, sitting, and standing. This made me notice something about my own teaching style. I realized I was always standing. I would move around the room, but I would never sit at the teacher’s desk. Some times I would sit at a desk in a circle with my students, but I would get up to write on the board and remain standing.

I could say this was my preferred teaching style. But I’m not sure that was completely true. After thinking about I realized it wasn’t so much that I felt more comfortable standing in front of my students as I felt the need to be standing above them. In other words, I was confusing authority with height. I’m short and the majority of the students are taller (and some are really a lot taller) than me. I felt being physically above my students gave me more control and authority in the classroom.

But one day I went to observe a class where the instructor was like me – a short woman. During this particular class she had the students standing and moving throughout the entire class meeting. She had them do one activity that asked them to move around the room asking one another questions. When they were ready to transition to the next activity she called them together and they all stood around her and listened. Watching her I realized that authority comes not from height or age, but rather from being prepared, from having a purposeful plan, from speaking with confidence. I realized that I didn’t have to speak over my students to gain their attention or their trust.

So I tried it. I first had the students move around in order to get into groups. When that worked, and I felt more comfortable I began incorporating activities that asked the students to move around the room. I still catch myself standing a lot. I still feel a little uncomfortable when a really tall student comes up to speak to me after class.  But I just try not to let my discomfort get in the way.

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Showing vs. Telling in the Teaching of Revision

Since the start of the semester I’ve been reading course evaluations and talking to teachers about their plans for the semester. These discussions usually lead to teachers wanting to work on a specific part of the curriculum. Sometimes it’s how to make in-class activities more purposeful, sometimes it’s how to use the readings more effectively, sometimes it’s how to design better peer review activities/exercises. These are all great things to work on. One thing I’m always working on is how to make each class meeting productive.

When we, as teachers, say we want to make peer review more useful, class time more productive, in-class activities more effective, I think we are pointing to a larger issue about our classes. The bulk of what we do—the readings, the peer response activities, the in-class exercises, our responses during the drafting process—are all about moving the students through a revision process. The drafting process that we teach is really a revision process, a process that enables our students to develop and complicate their ideas, a process that enables them to evaluate the choices they have in terms of tone, voice, language, structure, and organization.

So maybe it would be useful to ask ourselves two questions:

How can we teach revision better?

How can we enable students to see and understand the importance of revision?

As a writer and as a teacher of writing, I understand the importance of revision. Despite the longing in all of us (I admit it, I have that longing too) to write an essay, a short story, an article, etc. “right” the first time, it rarely happens. Writing is a process. We begin with an idea, a question, a thought and then we work at it. We read texts about what we are thinking about, we talk to colleagues about our ideas, we write more, we get feedback about what we are writing and that makes us write more, question more, read more, and then write more again. We work on shaping, testing out different introductions, conclusions, different organizations, different language. We write more. Revision helps us to think more deeply and more critically about what we want to say. Revision enables us to know and understand what we want to say.

So how do we enable our students to see the importance of revision?

The other morning when I was walking my dog I was thinking about this. In my own class, I know the things that I do are all geared to enabling the students to revise their papers. I even tell them at the beginning of the class the purpose of the in-class or peer review activity we are doing is to help them further revise their papers. At the end of class, I even remind them that everything we have done is to help them revise. But sometimes something seems to get lost along the way. Somehow somewhere along the line the things we do in class just seem like the things we do in class and writing multiple drafts seems like writing the same draft over and over again.

As my dog and I got closer to the lake we walk to each morning, the creative writing advice, “show don’t tell” popped into my mind. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time telling my students about the importance of revision rather than showing them why revision is important.

How can we do this?

This semester I want to keep working on making my class more productive. I want to make peer review more effective, my in-class activities purposeful, the discussion of the readings we do more useful. But I want to think about all of this in terms of how these activities and exercises show students the importance of revision. Here is my question:

How can I more effectively show my students the importance of revision?

Any thoughts?

 

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November

The other day in class I found myself answering the same questions over and over. What is it you want us to do again for peer response? Did you say we’re supposed to read the papers out loud? Are we supposed to write our partner a letter? When is the draft due? When is the final due again? Where is your office? Is it okay to use “I” in this paper? Will you take points off if I use “I”? Are we supposed to read our papers out loud? What do you want us to do?”

I try my best to answer each question as if it was the first time I have ever heard it today. I try to smile, but by the end of our class I can hear the impatience creeping into my voice. As I said earlier the draft is due on Thursday and it is on the assignment sheet I gave you last week. It’s also posted on Moodle. And maybe if you put your phones away you would know. I don’t actually say that about the phones, but I think it because I’ve had to remind a couple of people to put their phones away.

After class I go up to my office and check my email. Several students from my other class have emailed me to explain why they may not be able to come to class tomorrow: I’m sick. I have an appointment at health services. I have a review session for another class. I have to . . . .

I shut my office door and put my head down on my desk.

What is the matter with students?
Why can’t they just do what they’re supposed to do?
Why don’t they listen?
Why don’t they read the syllabus?
Why don’t they read the handouts I give them?
Why don’t they stop texting in class?
Why don’t they just stop talking in class?
Why don’t they pay attention?
Why haven’t they learned anything?
What is the matter with them?

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m cranky. I’m crabby. And I’m tired.

I’m also over-whelmed.

Every time I look at the calendar that first twinge of panic I felt when I flipped the page from October to November becomes stronger. The end of the semester is coming and coming fast. There seems to be so much to do and so little time. Every night I wake up at 3:00am wondering if I’m really going to get everything done.

I find myself complaining about everything. It’s cold in the morning. It gets dark too early. My classes aren’t going well. I have papers to read. I don’t know when I can get the yard raked. I don’t have time to do anything.  I’m tired.  I didn’t teach my students anything.

My husband points out that I always feel like this in November. He’s right.  The end of the semester is over-whelming. Back in September it seemed like we had all the time in the world to work through the writing process and the units. But now, in November, the end is so close and the number of classes that we have left seems to be slipping away. And, because it is November, the weeks we do have left for the semester are shorter due to the two holidays. It becomes clear that we have no buffer—the semester is going to end.

And if I’m feeling over-whelmed what are my students feeling? My students are working at finishing up not just my class, but three to four other classes. They are facing finals for the first time. They are registering for next semester classes for the first time on their own. And they are looking ahead to the holidays and the January break. In other words, this is the first time they have faced this end of semester crunch.

So maybe my students seeming inability to focus is really a symptom of being over-whelmed. Our students are learning how to manage their time and how to deal with the end of the semester stress. They are learning there is light at the end of this tunnel.

So how do we all deal with all this over-whelmness?

First, I try to remember that my students have been writing all semester and because they have been drafting and revising they have learned how to draft and how to revise. Writing is an on-going process and since they have been writing consistently and talking about writing they have all grown as writers and will continue to progress when they leave the classroom.  Even though my students don’t have the same amount of time to complete their final units as they did the earlier units, I remind myself they have already learned what they need to do.  So I tell them. You know how to draft. You know how to develop your ideas. You know how to do peer response. You know how to copy edit.

I also remind myself that being a little more concrete isn’t a bad thing. Going over the plan for the end of the semester at the beginning of each class helps to make things appear more manageable. Here is what we need to accomplish before the end of the semester and here is how we are going to do it.

I also keep in mind what I have learned from Gertrude Stein—there is no such thing as repetition.  Or in other words, repetition isn’t a bad thing. When we are over-whelmed it can be difficult to take in information. So repeating can help to make sure everyone is and stays on the same page.

And just acknowledging that the end of the semester can be over-whelming helps. It lets the students know they aren’t alone.  We’ll get everything done – it will be crazy, it will be hectic, but we’ll get everything done.

 

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Student Conferences

It’s that time of the semester again! Student conferences!

I do look forward to having conferences with my students. I enjoy sitting down with them and talking about their drafts. To be honest, this is why I became a writing teacher – so I could talk to people about their writing. I love the process of figuring out with a fellow writer how the piece of writing they are working on could be developed and revised.

Although the goal of these conferences in first-year writing is to work together with the student/writer, there is no one correct or perfect way of doing it. Me—I prefer to collect the students’ drafts ahead of time. I read through the drafts and then make notes and questions about things I want to talk about. Then when the student/writer comes in I use this as the start of the conversation. I begin by asking questions and (hopefully) the dialogue begins and together we work out a plan for revision.

I know others do it differently – some teachers have the students bring in their drafts, some people have group conferences. But I like the chance to think about the papers before I respond. However there is a danger here. Sometimes I think too much about the drafts and I have to be careful I’m not telling the students what to do. In other words I have to be careful that I don’t take their papers over. I also need to be careful I don’t spend too much time responding to the draft before the student/writer comes to my office. One of the advantages of having student conferences is so I don’t have to spend a lot of time writing comments. The 20 or so minutes I spend in the conference is supposed to be my responding time. So I don’t want to spend another 20-30 minutes planning out my response before the conference. So I limit myself to a small post-it note. I read through the draft, make notes on a post-it note. This limits my response and also allows the conversation between myself and the student to develop since I haven’t scripted out a plan for the student’s paper.  I also always begin by asking the student to tell me what he/she is thinking. And since we have done a round of peer response before they have come to the conference, I ask them what their responders have said too. And since their responders usually have good ideas, it makes my job easier. I can validate their peer responders and build off what they have said.

But this is just the way I do it. How do you do your conferences?

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The Balancing Act

The start of the new year and the balancing act begins. We are teachers, but we have other “lives” as well — graduate studies, scholary work, families, etc.

How do we balance all these lives?

 

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The Take Away

This seems to be the new buzz work – the take away. What is the take away? What are the students taking away from this class? What should the take away from this class be? All this talk of a “take away” implies that whatever the enterprise, students should leave with something. I’m not against this and I’m not really against the term take away. To be honest this term is much better than what I usually say at the end of my classes—“So what have we learned?” But to me this term implies there is something tangible that can be taken away, something concrete that students can carry away.  I’m not against this either. I think whatever enterprise we are engaged in there should be concrete goals and objectives.

These past couple of weeks I’ve been attending end of the semester events and I’ve seen some things happening.

At a reading at a local bookstore for one of our undergraduate experimental writing classes I saw a group of students stand up and read the most powerful poems, short fiction and manifestos about identity. 

At another reading for an undergraduate chapbook contest, I tried not to cry when the winner read her most recent poems. I have rarely been so moved at a poetry reading.

At the annual Residential Life First-Year Student Recognition Awards banquet I saw over 100 first-year students receive awards. These students were nominated by their teachers, not for being A students; rather for seeking extra help, being motivated to learn, and/or making a positive contribution in class. I saw 52 teachers recognized for being nominated by students because as teachers they made a difference in these students’ first-year at UMass by being available for extra help, giving them encouragement, helping them adjust to college, etc.

I attended a reading for senior creative writing English majors at another local bookstore and was amazed not only by the quality (and in many cases the humor) of their poems, fiction, and memoirs, but in their confidence as readers.

So this is my take away. If you give students the space they will write the most amazing and powerful things. And students take many more things away from our classes than the specific goals and objectives we have set.

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Spring Fever

The flu season is over and it looks like spring fever has set in—at least in my class it has.  The week after spring break I could see the beginnings of the symptoms. Although we were all grousing about how cold it still was, how mis-named “spring break” was because of the snow storm we had, how we all wished to see the sun again, the signs of spring fever were there. When I asked my students to do a freewrite they looked at me blankly.

“Freewrite?” They asked.

“Yes, a freewrite,” I said.

“What do you mean?” they asked.

“I mean write for five minutes like we usually do.”

And now the weather is really getting nice.

 So if you think your students may be coming down with spring fever here are some symptoms.

Blank looks when you ask them to do something you have asked them to do in class all semester ( i.e. get into small groups, get into a circle, do a freewrite.)

  • Become extremely animated when talking about non-class topics (i.e. where they are going to be living next year, when their registration time is, how to get tickets for the spring concert) and then becoming very quiet when you ask then something related to class (i.e. the reading, questions about the homework).
  • Coming late to class.
  • Not coming to class.
  • Forgetting to bring assignments to class.
  • Asking to go outside.
  • Look of shock every time you point out how many weeks are left in the semester.

I used to think spring fever was brought on by actual spring weather – warm weather, so warm you can take off the winter coat you’ve been wearing since November, grass turning green, daffodils blooming, sunshine, staying light past 4:00pm. But this year, since up until last week  it was still snowing in the morning at my house, I’ve come to realize that spring fever has almost nothing to do with the actual coming of spring. I’ve come to realize that the blank look my students give me is really just covering up the panic they are feeling about the end of the semester. They have a lot of work to do, not just in my class, but in all their classes and they know they only have a certain amount of time to get everything done.  And although we are nearing the end of this semester, we are all in the middle of planning for when the semester is over. Students are figuring out their plans for the summer, registering for fall classes, figuring out their housing assignments for next year.  In other words, even though they are physically present in our classes right now, mentally they are preparing for the summer and next year. Believe me I understand. I catch myself doing the same thing. And let’s be honest. It has been a long, cold winter trudging around campus and we are all a bit tired.  We are all ready to be done.

Are there any cures for spring fever?

I don’t know if there is a cure other than the coming of summer, but here are some things I try to do to combat spring fever.  First I give my class a little pep talk. Come on everyone. We only have a couple of more weeks to go—hang in there—stay focused. When that doesn’t work I’m ashamed to admit I have tried threatening. Okay—remember everything counts, so you could still fail the class if you don’t show up, don’t put in a good effort.  Just because you did a good job at the beginning of the semester doesn’t mean you can coast now.  To be honest I don’t actually use the word “fail” and these pep talks don’t really work that well.

Sometimes I find switching things up can help. Sometimes my classes can become a bit routine—doing the same kinds of things in the same way. So sometimes I try something different. Maybe ask the students to draw as a form of generative writing instead of writing. Maybe ask students to physically cut up their essays as a revision activity rather than exchanging papers and writing comments. Sometimes just changing things helps the symptoms of spring fever to subside for at least one class period. Sometimes just getting students up and moving around helps too.  It is a little harder to daydream about being on the beach when you have to get up and walk to the other side of the room.

I also just try to put my own feelings panic aside. Like the students I’m feeling a little overwhelmed – the end of the semester is coming so fast and the list of things I need to get done is also growing. But for the time I’m in class, I try to focus on class and try to challenge all those feelings of panic into enthusiasm for peer review.

But the best way I’ve found to combat spring fever is for all of us to just hang in there. Summer is around the corner and we will all get there.

 

 

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Drafting Purpose — Is It Done Yet?

When my first-year writing students say to me, “Why do I have to revise? I think my first draft is good.”  I reply, “Why do you want to settle for good enough?”

When the writing teachers I mentor ask, “What do you do when a student turns in a really good first draft?” I say, “I ask more complicated questions of the text.”

I say these things to students and the teachers I work with because as a writer I know that revision is part of the writing process, and because I believe no text is ever really done. For me, a piece of writing is “done” when I have run out of time to continue working on it or, in the case of my novel, I couldn’t bear to look at it one more minute. I also know that shifting something in the rhetorical situation (my thinking about something has changed, a different audience now makes sense, a different purpose) always cries out for a revision. Every text can be endlessly revised.

But I’m wondering if something else is being implied here, if there is something else behind these questions the students and teachers ask. I’m wondering if we need to re-think what we mean by drafting.

I’ve been thinking that students and even teachers (okay I’ll admit it—even I have thought this) believe that drafting is only for those who can’t get it right the first time. Really good writers get it right the first time and really bad writers have to do a bunch of drafts until they can get it right. (Okay, I’ll admit it. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent crying at my desk because I had to do yet another draft in order to get it “right.”)  

I understand why our students come into our classes believing this. We are surrounded by writing “myths” that support this. Good writers are born talented, good writers get inspired. Good writers have the words, the sentences, the paragraphs pour effortlessly out of their fingers and onto the page. Bad writers struggle.

The implication here is that no matter what we write there is a perfect text – the perfect essay, the perfect seminar paper, the perfect article—and we are trying to achieve this “perfect” text as quickly as possible.

But what is a perfect text?

Is there a perfect text?

Students come into our classrooms thinking that for each of the essay units there is an A+ essay and this writing process we ask them to go through is a way that enables them to achieve that paper. And although we try to convince our students that the process we teach them isn’t really about this and that revision is something all writers do, I’m thinking that the way we ask students to draft may just undermine what we are saying. I’ve been thinking that we may just reinforce this notion of the perfect text by asking students to write a draft that looks and is in the same shape as their final essay. Although we expect everything to be “rough” (Just get your ideas down! Don’t worry about your grammar – yet!) the assumption is the first draft with its “rough” introduction, “rough” body paragraphs, “rough” conclusion, is just a “rough” version of what the final draft will eventually look like. We then start working from that draft and begin the revising process usually keeping the same structure, usually pointing out where things can be further developed, added, deleted, and moved around. Each draft then becomes a version of the previous draft. And because these multiple drafts look the same, students become locked into re-arranging what is already there.

So I’ve been thinking. What if we re-thought this whole drafting thing? What if the drafts looked different? What if each draft looked so different that the point of revision was to write something different?  What if we thought more about what specific purpose each draft could serve?

For example, last semester for our “Adding to the Conversation” unit I asked the students to begin by writing a draft that was one page discussing everything they already knew about their topic, and one page discussing everything they had discovered. For Draft #2 the students selected a specific audience for their topic and wrote a letter to a member of that audience. For Draft #3 the students selected a form that was best suited to their audience and wrote their draft in that form. The final draft was a copyedited version of Draft #3.

How was this different?

Rather than asking students to select their audience, purpose and form in the beginning of the writing process, I broke it down. The purpose of the first draft was to enable the students to get everything they knew and learned about their topics down. Rather than attempting to weave their research in with their own voices right away this enabled them to separate everything out so they could see what they were thinking. On this draft we did revision exercises to enable them to develop their own purpose and to explore different audiences. Once they decided on an audience, the letter (Draft #2) enabled them to speak directly to that audience, to test out what they wanted to say. This enabled them to think further about their purpose and to identify points where they needed to do further research. Once they settled on their purpose and audience, they revised (Draft #3) into a form that seemed best suited for their specific audience. This draft was revised for content, sentence structure, and mechanical/grammar issues into the final version.

Did this work?

I think so. I saw the students taking up the idea of revision in a more global way because since each draft was different they could not simply add, delete, or move existing paragraphs around. I also found that they were more open to possible directions for their final papers because they were not attached to any particular draft during the process.  The students didn’t really see that they were writing the same thing over and over. Instead they were writing their way to a final paper.

Could their final versions have been revised a few more times? Of course. More focusing on the overall structure would have been great, some points could have been developed a bit more, some focus on sentence structure would have been beneficial. But right now I’m wondering if thinking more about what specific purpose each draft could serve within the writing process and making that purpose visible may enable students to focus on writing their way to the essay they want to write rather than attempting to get it right in one shot.