SQR3

Andrea Alanis


ENG 1320/1301

TRANG PHAN

09/07/10

REVISION STRATEGIES OF STUDENT WRITERS AND EXPERIENCED ADULT WRITERS

What this article written by Nancy Sommers talks about is of strategies of students writers and Gordon Rohman that says that the composing process moves from prewriting to writing and James Brittonsays that the writing process is described in metaphors.

The article says that in the writing process they have the methology that was a study at the Boston University and Oklahoma´s University. The essays they wrote were analyzed by counting and categorizing the changes made. They used four operations: deletion, substitution, addition and reordering and another four levels that were, word, phrase, sentences and theme.

Students understand the revision process and they think that revision is essential for a speech because they have the opportunity to check what they have written and corrected or change it. But one of the things they fear the most is repetition, students tend to repeat things in their speeches but a lot of them prepare themselves reading books to have more ideas.

The experienced writers have a different revising process, they describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument. They imagine a reader that is going to revise or check their composition. Also the experienced writers see their revision process as a recursive process. You can see that student writers and experienced writers have a very different view of revising process but if you follow the experienced writer process you will succeed.



QUESTION:

What are the revision strategies of experienced writers found in Sommer’s studies? What can you learn from those strategies?



RESPONSE:

Students begin to write and they keep writing until they believe the paper is done, most of them will not rewind themselves and take the time check their work because of the fact that students believe that their work is all correct. Students should consider improving their work and always having in mind that revising is essential in any kind of writing work. The author´s most important task is to make students improve their writing skill that is why in this article she offers students strategies that would help them because she discovered that those strategies were the ones used by experienced writers and that’s why they write quality papers. One of the strategies experienced writers use in this article is that as a writer students have to be able to find “the form or shape of their argument”. This means that students have to be able to write several drafts of the same paper but each time making revision so at the end students can be able to obtain a paper that has a good argument and be understandable to the reader. To create a good work students have to use a different strategy that consists in looking at your paper with “new eyes”. Meaning that as writer students they have to be able to look at their work from a different perspective or angle every time they correct it. Everyone can apply these strategies, revising it is not just to make people take longer in their work but to make them improve their work.