Williams, 2008; Gopen, 2004; Harris, 2006; and Lindenman, Camper, Dunne Jacoby, and Enoch, 2018.)
What our students need to understand is that for expert writers the actual act of writing causes further discovery, development, and modification of ideas. If one examines the evolving drafts of an expert writer, one sees the messy, recursive process of thinking itself as new ideas emerge during the drafting process. Expert writers do extensive rewriting, the final products often being substantially different from the first drafts.
The foregoing description differs from an older positivist model of the writing process that many of us of a certain age were taught in school. The old model looked like this:
A Positivist Model of the Writing Process
1 Choose a topic.
2 Narrow it.
3 Write a thesis.
4 Make an outline.
5 Write a draft.
6 Revise.
7 Edit.
This description presupposes what Elbow (1973) calls the “think, then write” model of composing in which writers discover, clarify, and organize their ideas before they start to write. But it seriously misrepresents the way most academic writers actually compose. For example, few scholars report starting an article by choosing a topic and then narrowing it. Rather, academic writers report being gradually drawn into a conversation about a question that does not yet seem resolved. The writer‐to‐be finds this conversation somehow unsatisfactory; something is missing, wrongheaded, unexplained, or otherwise puzzling. Similarly, having focused on a problem, only rarely does a skilled academic writer write a thesis statement and outline before embarking on extensive exploration, conversation, correspondence with colleagues, and even, on some occasions, writing one or more drafts. A thesis statement often marks a moment of discovery and clarification—an “aha!” experience (“So this is my point! Here is my argument in a nutshell!”) rather than a formulaic planning device at the very start of the process.
Presenting students with this problem‐driven model of the writing process has a distinct advantage for teachers. It allows them to link the teaching of writing to their teaching the modes of inquiry and discovery in their disciplines. Their goal is to get students personally engaged with the kinds of questions that propel writers through the writing process. Thus the writing process itself becomes a powerful means of active learning in the discipline.
Why Don't Students Revise?
If one of our major goals is to teach thinking through revision, we need to understand more clearly why students do not revise. Our first tendency may be to blame students' lack of motivation or their ineffective time management. They do not revise because they are not invested in their work or do not care about it or simply put off getting started until the night before a paper is due. But other explanations should also be considered.
For example, one hypothesis, influenced by Piagetian theory, argues that revision requires the ability to “decenter” (Bradford, 1983; Kroll, 1978)—that is, to think like a reader instead of a writer. One of Piaget's observations is that persons identified as concrete operational reasoners have difficulty switching perspectives. If sitting in the back of a classroom, for example, a person may have trouble sketching the room from the perspective of a lecturer standing in front. By analogy, novice writers may have difficulty imagining their drafts from a reader's perspective. If a passage seems clear to the writer, he or she believes that it ought to be immediately clear to the reader also. Novice writers may simply not recognize their reader's confusion and consequently not recognize the need to fill in gaps, to link new information to old information, or to arrange material in the order needed by readers.
Related theories emphasize students' lack of familiarity with academic genres or with the complexity of addressing rhetorical problems (purpose, audience, genre) as well as subject matter problems. What drives revision for mature writers is their awareness of the complex conversation that a piece of writing must join—how its argument must accommodate objections raised by a skeptical reader, for example, while also following the conventions of the genre and contributing something new to the conversation. Expert writers can concentrate on only one or two problems at a time. They need multiple drafts in order to work through their many different goals and rhetorical constraints.
Another contributing factor may be the difficulty of getting a bird's‐eye view of a draft when composing on screen. During the early days of word processing, several researchers (Daiute, 1986; Hawisher, 1987) showed that although word processing facilitates sentence‐level revision as well as some larger‐scale revisions such as additions, deletions, and block moves of text, it may actually discourage major reconceptualizing of a text—the kind of global revision that leads to substantial dismantling and rewriting. By revising from the screen rather than from a hard copy, writers see only narrow windows of their text rather than the whole. Global revision often requires the writer to revisit earlier passages, to compare, for example, a point being made on page 7 with what was forecast on page 2. Such a bird's‐eye overview of a text is easier with hard copy than on screen, where scrolling backward is time‐consuming. (The difference between revising on screen versus paper is analogous to reading on an e‐reader such as Kindle versus on paper, where you can quickly flip to the table of contents, the index, or previous pages.)
Whatever the cause of students' failure to revise, teachers need to create an academic environment that encourages revision. The importance of revision has been highlighted by the NSSE/WPA research on writing assignments that contribute to deep learning (Anderson, Anson, Gonyea, and Paine, 2015, 2016). This research identifies the presence of “interactive elements” in an assignment as the first of three criteria for best practices. These interactive elements include building into the assignment opportunities for in‐class brainstorming, peer review, teacher feedback on drafts, or visits to a writing center. (See chapter 4 for further discussion of the NSSE/WPA research.)
Fifteen Suggestions for Encouraging Revision
In the spirit of this research, we offer fifteen suggestions for promoting revision by building interactive elements into an assignment or a course.
1 Profess a problem‐driven model of the writing process. Instead of asking students to choose “topics” and narrow them, encourage students to pose questions or problems and explore them. Show how inquiry and writing are related.
2 Give problem‐focused writing assignments. Students are most apt to revise when their essays are responses to genuine problems, whether provided by the teacher or posed by the student. See chapter 4 for advice on creating writing assignments that guide students toward a problem‐thesis structure.
3 Create active learning tasks that help students become posers and explorers of questions. Students need to be seized by questions and to appreciate how the urge to write grows out of the writer's desire to say something new about a question or problem. Through classroom activities that let students explore their own responses to questions, students rehearse the thinking strategies that underlie revision. Chapters 6 through 10 focus on strategies for active learning.
4 Incorporate low‐stakes exploratory writing into your course. Chapter 5 suggests numerous
