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Erika Carrizales

Eng 1300/1320.158

Trang Phan

09/10/10

Nancy Sommers. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 31m No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 38-388.

Summary

In the article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”, Nancy Sommers is talking about the differences in revision between the experienced writers and the student writers.

Plenty of the students rarely use the term revision, which is “a stage that comes after the completion of a first or second draft and one that is temporally distinct from the prewriting and writing stages of the process”; for students is more common redoing everything.

According to Sommers students have lot of problems with the vocabulary, it is hard for them to polish the words that there are using, into catchier words. They feel more comfortable writing when they are more inspired, because the words flow easier and they don’t get stuck in the same words.

Experienced writers describe that their main objective is, find the form of what they are writing; but also, the person that would be reading it, the reader. They believe that their experiences would help the reader to get a better idea of it; demonstrating thru examples all what they have learned. When they look what they have written, sometimes they change into simpler words what they had, so it’s easier to the reader to get it.

Question:

“If the students feel inspired, if the writing comes easily, and if they don't get stuck on individual words or phrases, then they say that they cannot see any reason to revise” (382). Explain it:

For me, as a student it is easier to start writing when I am inspired, because I use a more complex vocabulary that when I don’t know anything about a certain topic. It does help to have at least some inspiration in order to not just be guessing or going out of topic.

At the same time we have to be conscious, that not just because we have an idea of it we know everything. There might be a point in which we do run out of words, but still it’s easier to go back on track.

In addition, when we are inspired, we do feel that what we have wrote is totally right, but there are some exemptions, in which we have to go back and look at it, to see what we should take out or what do we have to improve, in order to have a better one.