SQR3

Jessica Mendoza

ENG 1320/1301. 158

Instructor: TrangPhan

Sep. 9, 2010

Nancy Sommers. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 31, No.4 (Dec. 1980), pp. 378-388.


S.      Nancy Sommers talked about how writers have stopped using basic writing process to start and finish a paper. She explains how most of us while writing a paper the most important part is to revise the paper, which we as student seem not to like and it shows in the final essay. She then got twenty college freshmen to write three papers each and by doing that they rewrote each essay twice. By doing this she saw a big change in the way the first essay was written to the last one they revised. Most of these students didn’t use the word revising, they like using words like reviewing, redoing, and marking out.Vocabulary is a big thing when it comes to revising, when checking on your vocabulary this is the time when you can use your thesaurus and change words you’ve used to many times or change them completely. Inspiration is a word us as writers and students use when we felt inspired when writing a paper and seem to write it with no difficulty. When this happens we seem to think we don’t need to revise because we had no problem writing the essay. Nancy also takes about “student writers” and “experienced writers” the different between them and the different points of view that they have. 

Q. What are the revision strategies of experienced writers found in Sommers’s studies?

What can you learn from those strategies?

R.        One of the strategies that Sommer found in her studies is finding the form and shape of an argument. Another strategy is having new eyes to “re-view” their work. The experienced writers think that the student writers don’t have these strategies. They think they have learned the behaviors of their reader, what the readers like and don’t. From finding the form and shape for a paper I think I can say that this is a very important skill to master. I don’t think it’s very easy to find and shape the way you’re going to make your paper flow, or at least it’s difficult for me to start and make my essay flow and keep it interesting. I myself as a student writer have a different way of seeing things then for an experienced writer. For me as a student writer I see the word “rewriting” or “revising” as scratching out and making corrections on that same paper, if I have word repeating a lot I just change by using a thesaurus, looking through my vocabulary and grammar, or marking out words I don’t like. An experienced writer has a different way of seeing the word “revising” they actually rewrite, and revise. The strategies that the experienced writers have can help me in the way that I can try to see my final paper in a different point of view, I can try and see if my readers will be understood and hope that my point gets across.