Chapter 6: Empowering Revision
Nicolas Coles states something that is common knowledge for English
teachers—that students (here, “basic writers”) don’t like to revise. Most of the experience they have writing may
actually inhibit revising, but a semester long sequence of assignments on a
topic students know something about may provide a context in which students can
come to see the value in revision.
In revision, a writer can confront problems that are easily ignored in
a first draft—if something didn’t make sense, if something needs more
explanation, or if what s/he wrote did not have the desired effect on the
audience. By revising for these kinds of
problems, students start to become members of a “scholarly community.”
Coles uses examples of students’ papers in various states of revision
to discuss two revision activities: reshaping a narrative so that is provides a
basis for generalizations, and forming those generalizations within the context
of a story. He also discusses students’
use of cliché and slogans as “ready-made languages of cultural convention.” He also discusses an assumption of basic
writers that they need to tell the “truth” of a story, and that reshaping the “facts”
of the story will be somehow untruthful.
He makes a reference to Moffet, saying sometimes it’s better to “trade a
loss of reality tor a gain in control.”
I wonder if students today feel this as strongly as they did back when
this book was written. With Facebook and
Twitter, I think that kids today might be more used to presenting something
that is shaped to form a perspective. I
know that when I post on Facebook myself, I often write what I want to say and
then look at it for a few moments to see if it is hitting the right tone and
message. On the other hand, I “know” a
few people on Facebook who seem to just post whatever comes into their heads,
with clearly no thought of what they might be presenting to the world.
The last point that I thought was important was Cole’s discussion of
teacher comments. He says that his intention when giving
comments is always to
“draw the writer
into becoming an active reader of his own paper…so that he can go on the the next
draft to produce a fuller, smarter and more satisfying representation of
himself and his relation to his subject.” (190)
In
my own teaching I have been struggling with assessment and comments. I am coming out of a phase where I taught
(ESL) composition as a simple series of mechanics to follow. I think the students learned what I was
teaching well enough, but the problem was that the product was just that:
mechanical. I am looking to spread my
wings and find better ways to help my students write more deeply and
spread their own wings, so looking at comments in this way helps me to frame the
way I give comments, by looking at the goal of comments in this new way.
At the end of the chapter, Coles seems to pull back from his title, "Empowering Revision," but still makes the point that in revising in this way students can start to move against "authoritative institutional languages" which structure their discourse. I'd also like to think this is true, that by understanding how society expects them to think and how their thinking might be different, they might be able to find some personal power.
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