Radical Revision

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Radical Revision

• Teaching Revision Techniques

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Revision

• What does it mean to revise?
• What is your revision process?
• How has your revision process changed over the
  past few years?
• How did you learn about revision?
• What are your general feelings about revision?
  What about those of your classmates?

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Revision

• The word revision comes from the word revise,
  which means to see again.
• Re (again)
• Vise (to see)
• How can we teach other writers, and ourselves, to
  see again? How can we become confident and
  enthusiastic about the revision process so that
  we can, in turn, excite others by the process?

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What do our students consider revision to be?

• Some students may not meet our expectations for
  revision because they understand the term very
  differently than we do. When Nancy Sommers, a
  researcher at Harvard, asked student writers and
  professional authors what "revision" meant to
  them, they gave her wildly divergent answers
• "just using better words and eliminating words
  that are not needed. I go over and change words
  around."
• "cleaning up the paper and crossing out. It is
  looking at something and saying, no that has to
  go, or no, that is not right."
• "on one level, finding the argument, and on
  another level, language changes to make the
  argument more effective."
• "a matter of looking at the kernel of what I
  have written, the content, and then thinking
  about it, responding to it, making decisions, and
  actually restructuring it."
• Whereas the students described revision as a
  process of making adjustments at a more
  superficial level ("just using better words" and
  "cleaning up"), the professional authors
  described revision as a process of making
  fundamental changes to a paper ("finding the
  argument" and "actually restructuring").
  Instructors of Comm-B and WI courses, no doubt,
  have the latter definitions in mind. But when
  students and instructors understand the term
  revision so differently, it is no surprise that
  students don't undertake the kinds of revisions
  instructors have in mind.Yet other students may
  be willing to revise and may comprehend the kinds
  of revision that their instructors have in mind,
  but still make only superficial corrections to
  their drafts because they lack specific
  strategies to help them successfully undertake
  more fundamental revisions.

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How much do students revise?

• For the novice writer, however, revision appears
  to be synonymous with editing or proofreading. An
  NAEP (1977) study found that students' efforts at
  revision in grades 4, 8, and 11 were devoted to
  changing spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
  Students seldom made more global changes, such as
  starting over, rewriting most of a paper, adding
  or deleting parts of the paper, or adding or
  deleting ideas (Applebee, et al., 1986).

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Resistance to Revision from Acts of Revision

• Revision is trivial, the nitpicky correcting of
  superficial niceties.
• Revision is unnecessary.
• Revision makes things worse.
• Revision is wasted time.
• Revision is drudgery only the first draft is
  creative.
• Revision is a sign of failure, and criticism a
  personal affront.
• You dont have time to revise.
• You dont know how to revise.

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Modeling the Revision Process

• Show your students examples of revision
• Particularly your own revisions. Show an essay
  you wrote and the many versions that you wrote
  before coming to the final draft.
• Present the story A Good, Small Thing or The
  Bath by Raymond Carver, both of which have two
  published versions which are each wildly
  different. If you have time, you might also show
  clips from the film Short Cuts in order to show
  how the stories were revised by the director and
  producer of the film and talk about what makes
  the film version of the story different from the
  two versions they have read.

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Revision Exercises

• Try a descriptive outline.
• Read your writing out loud.
• Draft generously and cut down later.
• Highlight the Center-of-Gravity sentence in each
  paragraph of your draft. This is similar to but
  not the same as composing a descriptive outline,
  which asks that you create a new summarizing
  sentence for each paragraph. Peter Elbow
  suggests that the center-of-gravity sentence in
  freewriting is that sentence which calls
  attention to itself, seems core, crucial,
  provocative, evocative, and so on.
• At the end of each day of drafting a text, write
  down what youd do to this draft if you had one
  more hour, one more day, one more week, and one
  more month to revise. As you begin the next
  drafting session, start by reading these notes to
  help you reenter the draft.

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More exercises

• Instead of a fat draft, which entails a bit of
  freewriting and sometimes unmindful expansion,
  expand more mindfully. Add a paragraph (or a
  stanza) between each paragraph (or stanza) that
  already exists. If you have only one paragraph,
  add a new sentence between each old sentence and
  see what that expanded paragraph tells you to
  write next.
• Write a contrasting paragraph to each assertion
  you made in your draft.

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Still more

• Insert a list into your text and then explore the
  items in the list. Instead of using the list to
  compress an idea, use it to open up ideas.
• Two days after finishing your first full-breath,
  shareable, draft, copy your conclusion to a new
  file and write two pages, using this conclusion
  to begin your new draft. When working with a
  research paper, resist including any quotes. Now
  that youre more learned and expert about your
  subject, try to detail your points in your own
  words (you can include and attribute sources
  later). If you cant do this, you have a clue
  that the sources in your full-breath draft may be
  shoring up a discussion that you dont really
  understand.

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Yes, more

• Play transition cop. Highlight your transition.
  Footnote each with an explanation of how each
  transition (word, phrase, or even paragraph)
  functions in the text. Look for predictable
  patterns and try to alter them in conventional
  and unconventional ways. Review the highlighting
  to identify overtransitioned sections and
  undertransitioned sections.
• Give your text (physical) voice. Add dialogue to
  your text, no matter what the genre. Let the
  addition of quoted, spoken words complicate and
  open up your text.

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Grammar B

• English 101
• Grammar B
• Grammar is essentially a set of conventions that
  everyone agrees to follow. Grammar A is the set
  of conventions that produces formal, standard
  English, the set youve been learning and
  required to reproduce in all your papers for
  school. Grammar B is another set of rules that
  only certain professional writers get away with,
  but which produces meaning much more accurately
  and expressively for certain occasions. Winston
  Weathers article Grammars of Style (in
  Rhetoric and Composition, Ed. R. Graves, 1984.
  Porstmouth, NH Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1984) is
  my source for this handout.
• Below are some ways that you can use Grammar B in
  the next version of your paper
• Crots. A crot is a chunk of sentences or text
  that all goes together in some way. It looks
  like a note without the text that its
  notating. You could write a series of crots as
  snapshots separated by space or asterisks.
• Labryinthine Sentences. A long, winding, endless
  sentence which usually follows Grammar A within
  phrases but not necessarily in the sentences as a
  whole, which may use parentheses, series set off
  by semicolons, embedded phrases, explanations
  within explanations (such as why this particular
  sentence is not really a very labyrinthine
  sentence because it is too short and too
  straightforward.)
• Sentence Fragments. Use them. Often. To give a
  sense of uncertainty. Or separation.
• Lists. Generally A minimum of five
• Usually Independent of a sentence
• Possibly Written horizontally or vertically or
  otherwise
• Sometimes Looks like a poem
• Double-Voice Two or more competing or
  complementing perspectives can be written in the
  same text breath using parentheses, italics,
  spacing, questions, or just much different
  styles. Yeah, right, Im sure they understand
  double-voice with that incredibly hopeless
  sentence. Double-voicing is a dialogue without
  Grammar A dialogue punctuation and without the
  framing devices for dialogue. Geez, maybe I
  should write this in columns as a better example
  and dont I need to warn them not to overuse the
  computer-font/styles? Changing fonts or print
  styles is not double-voicing, though, so dont
  use the computer tricks instead of thinking out
  your meaning. No, this belongs below with the
  guidelines.
• Synchronicity. If the writer scrambles verb
  tenses and time markers, the reader got the sense
  that the point will be less about had a point
  that about becoming a point.
• Collage/Montage. Crots, lists, fragments, and
  labyrinthine sentences, poems, descriptions,
  maxims, schedules, stories can be combined into a
  collage, a loosely organized group of different
  kinds of text.

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Grammar B, continued

• Guidelines for Producing a Grammar B draft
• Dont change topics/its too late now.
• If you conceive of a Grammar B-like device that
  fits what you want to say (that is, breaks one
  rule of Grammar A to good effect).
• Do it.
• Dont change font styles every other word or add
  obscure symbols and call it Grammar B. It wont
  B.
• Have fun. Play. Take a Chance. If it Fails
  because you tried something that didnt work, it
  didnt Fail. If it fails because you didnt try,
  it failed.
• Do as the handout describes, not as it does.
  This handout uses too many different Grammar B
  techniques because its trying to illustrate
  possibilities rather than make sense.
• The POINT of this assignment, which I place at
  the end of the handout instead of the Grammar A
  position at the beginning of the handout, is to
  understand better what Grammar A is all about by
  using Grammar B, to explore what Grammar A (and
  Grammar B, perhaps) fails to express, to be
  politically aware (instead of politically
  correct) of who gets to make rules like Grammar A
  and who doesnt, who gets to use Grammar B and
  why, what the rules of Grammar A accomplish in
  terms of communication, expression,
  meaning-making, to explore further the concept of
  revision, by writing a radically different
  version of a paper (or, in your case, a post) and
  to imagine more possibilities and power in
  language than Grammar A (or our assumptions and
  ignorances about Grammar A) allow us.

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Reading and Sources

• Bishop, Wendy. (1997). Elements of Alternative
  Style Essays on Writing and Revision.
  Portsmouth Boynton Cook.
• Bishop, Wendy. (2004). Acts of Revision A Guide
  for Writers. Portsmouth Boynton Cook.
• Hoaning, Alice S. (2002).