SQR3

Ricardo Salinas

ENG 1320/1301. 158

Trang Phan

9/10/2010

Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers

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


Summary :

This text is talking about students when the teacher or someone is telling them to revise the essay or the draft they have done, for them revising is just adding and crossing words and they are just going to do that one draft and use that to do their essay.

            They did an study on student writers and on experienced writers they put them in groups. The student writers write the draft and essay in a linear function, they didn’t know what was rewriting and revising they thought it was just deleting a word and put another one, they considered and believe that most of their problems in the essay can be solved by rewording, they also taught that if they were inspired they didn’t have to revise the essay because they felt what they want to say, so there was no reason for make revisions, just they change the introductory paragraphs.

The experienced writers they knew what was rewriting and revision they always applied that to their drafts and to their essays, their taught to the rewriting was finding form or shape to their argument, they use their first draft not like a final draft they use it to define what they want to write, the second draft is to observe the general patterns deciding what to include and what to exclude. They don’t see the essay structured as a line they see it like a whole and the heaviest concentration of changes that they do is on sentence levels by addition and deletion.

Question:

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

Response:

The first thing that the experienced writers do is finding form or shape to their argument, they also see the essay as a whole not just in linear form, because when you see it like a line form maybe doesn’t form the shape of what you are really talking about, when they do an essay they usually do 3 drafts, the first one is use to define what is going to be about, the second one is to see what are you going to leave and what is going to be excluded from the text, the third one is usually to see how is going to be their essay, is their final draft.

We can learn about the experienced writers how they see the essay as a whole and we can try to do that, and also learn that using just one draft is not enough you need more than that so you can improve on the work that we are going to do.