When a student writes something and fails, it is important for the teachers to tell them that no great writer does something they are satisfied with the first draft. Letting them know that it is important that not everything you write is going to be great, and that there is always room to learn and grow from your mistakes is important to their development. One point that I found very interesting from Brooke and Carr’s piece was that students are afraid to branch out and try new things because they do not want to mess their grades up. This is very true and it is sad because it essentially proves that the school system is killing creativity and the student’s own voices in their writing. I think it is our job as teachers to try and find a balance to make sure that the students can feel safe in branching out to try new things. Whether this is a similar policy to what we have in this course that allows you to revise and change a paper if you need to. Something should be done to let the students try new things and fail and grow from their mistakes.
Going off from my point of allowing students to fail, revising is something that I hadn’t given too much thought about for experienced writers because I always have thought of it as something that you just go back and check for grammar, flow, and making sure whatever you wrote just makes sense. The point that Sommers made about how students do not really revise, and they just do it when their teacher says so and they do it narrowly. This goes back to my point of students being afraid to change things up and to fail, or change some things around. They do not want to risk getting a worse grade for the sake of revising or changing things in their papers. I definitely learned some strategies for revision from this article, and I would consider myself an experienced essay writer I would presume. I have been writing papers for years now and I still do not even have my own revision process, and one thing I will work on is making sure that my point is made and that all of the details are necessary to explain my reasoning effectively.
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