Making Time for Revision

• In-Class Revising Activities
  One way to make time for revising – and to help students practice new revising strategies – is to facilitate in-class revising activities. Several ideas are noted below.

• Time for Revision in Assignment/Project Schedule
  If we want students to grapple with revising and to make sophisticated rhetorical choices, then we must make time for revising in project schedules. How much time do you allot for revising in your current assignment schedules? 2 days? 0 days? 1 week? What do you do in-class during that time?

• Multiple Drafts
  Another way to promote revising is to require multiple drafts and to offer clear guidance on how subsequent drafts should differ from earlier drafts in the project. Do you discuss with students the rationale for requiring more than one draft? How do you articulate the changes you expect to see?

• Revising Days vs. Editing Days
  In some second language writing pedagogies, instructors differentiate between revising days and editing days. On revising days, students only receive feedback on higher order concerns (topic development, use of evidence, organization, etc.). Students respond to this initial revising feedback and bring a second draft for an editing day, when they receive feedback on lower order concerns (sentence style, mechanics, grammar, etc.). This distinction transfers well to mainstream writing classrooms as a way to help students concentrate on significant revisions before focusing on editing that might become irrelevant if the writer is still revising. How else might planning separate revising and editing days help us support the ENG 110 objective of helping students develop sophisticated writing processes? The objective of helping students develop an understanding of the relationship of purpose, audience, and voice, and an awareness that writing expectations and conventions vary within the academy and in professional and public discourse?

Tags: revising, writing process