Let’s kick things off with Charles Bazerman and Howard Tinberg’s Writing is an Expression of Embodied Cognition. “Writing is a full act of the mind, drawing on the full resources of our nervous system, formulating communicative impulses into thoughts and words, and transcribing through the work of the fingers” (Bazerman & Tinberg). Well, yes, writing is more than just putting thoughts on a page. As mentioned in the reading, writing is a full-body experience, tapping into multiple parts of the brain. Like Gardner, I think recognition of this is important and fitting.
Onto Collin Brooke and Allison Carr’s Failure Can Be an Important Part of Writing Development. “They must have the opportunity to try, to fail, and to learn from those failures as a means of intellectual growth” (Brooke & Carr). I agree with this reading; there’s so much beauty in failure. As mentioned, students get caught up in the grade, and they don’t take risks, impeding their growth in the long run. I think the education system needs to change our relationship with grading. However, that’s a big ask. On a smaller scale, teachers should allow students to redo every assignment, big or small. It creates more work for teachers, but it’s more important that students have a chance to recognize what they did wrong and make things right while receiving the credit they deserve.
Moving right along to Doug Downs’ Revision Is Central to Developing Writing, the perfect text after Brooke and Carr. This brought up a lot of great points. Revision is important and undisputedly makes you a better writer over time. As mentioned, students often have a bad perception of revision, and that needs to be changed within educational culture. I also find some value in why he hinted at revision not being optional. We can’t understand the importance of revision, but then allow students, or even teachers, to pick and choose when revision is appropriate. Revision is always appropriate. “When we teach the centrality of revision to writing development, therefore, we must also teach writers to develop workflows that anticipate and rely on revision and to discover what methods of revision best suit their own writing processes” (Downs). How do we do this, though? How do we develop students’ workflows to rely on revision, and, depending on their level, how do we help them find a revision method that works best for them? These are hard tasks for educators.
We’re going to finish things off with Nancy Sommers’ Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, which I had many thoughts about. I find Britton’s theory that writing is a linear experience to be fundamentally flawed. It definitely isn’t linear; rather, it’s a continuous cycle that, some might argue, never truly ends. “By staging revision after enunciation, the linear models reduce provision in writing, as in speech, to no more than an afterthought” (Sommers 379). Herein lies the problem: as the article continues, it highlights one of the issues in teaching. Revision isn’t encouraged enough and is often taught as an afterthought in classrooms. “The predominant concern in these definitions is vocabulary” (Sommers 381). I can certainly understand why this is a primary concern for college students, especially freshmen. There’s a narrative that, in order to be seen as informed, one must be equipped with jargon. Students want to sound polished and appeal to their audience, the professor, so they are naturally drawn to vocabulary. “This results, in part, from the fact that students have been taught another version of the linear model of composing, which emphasizes using a thesis statement as a controlling device in their introductory paragraphs” (Sommers 382). I vividly remember being taught this as well. Having personally experienced it, I believe this approach can stifle a student’s ability to explore other directions. Sometimes it feels like once you solidify your thesis, there’s no wiggle room, and you just have to see it through. Furthermore, students generally aren’t taught the skills to troubleshoot when writing. Whether it’s revising or composing, many students hit a wall and don’t know how to address the issue. While peer assistance and teacher guidance can help in the moment, they don’t equip students with the tools they need for the long run. “It is a sense of writing as discovery—a repeated process of beginning over again, starting anew—that the students failed to have” (Sommers 387). Writing as discovery is an important framework that all teachers should implement in their classrooms. If students were taught that writing and revision are about discovery and are ongoing processes, perhaps they wouldn’t feel so hesitant and lost when engaging in them.
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