SQR_3

Roxanna Diaz
Eng 1320/1301.158
Trang Phan
September 7, 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

Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers
SUMMARY:
In this article by Nancy Sommers, the main point was how student writers and experienced writers saw revising in different ways. She was able to obtain this information by doing a study on 20 college freshman and 20 experience writers to see what the thought about this subject. The student writers saw revising as something they had to do just because it was something they had been taught all their life. They dislike revising so much that they didn’t even like using the word instead they used words like “scratch out and do over again”, “redoing”, and “reviewing” The students main thought of revising was that they need to use better vocabulary on their paper. In the other hand the experience writers saw revising as something necessary for them to do because that was the way they could improve their writing. The way they would improve was by each time they revised their paper they saw it with “new eyes” which means they looked at it from a different angle. As Sommer said at the end “seek dissonance of discovery” which means when revising you are always going to discover something new.


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

RESPONSE:
When a student starts to write they just keep going until they think there paper is finished but some of them won’t go back and revise them because they thing it all good. These students have to realized that there is always room for improvement and should go back to revise. Sommers the author of the article gives these students some strategies that would be helpful because she saw that it was what experienced used and that’s why they had quality papers. One of the strategies that were in this article was that as a writer we have to be able to find “the form or shape of their argument”. This indicates that we have to be able to write several drafts of the same paper but each time making revision so at the end we can be able to obtain a paper that has a good argument and be understandable to the reader. In order to obtain a good paper we also have to use another strategy which is look at your paper with “new eyes”. This means that as a writer we have to be able to look at our paper from a different perspective or angle every time we revise it. I think what we can learn from these strategies is that revising it not just to make us do more work it is to help improve our paper and make of better quality.