Revising: Student Writers
Student
Well, at this point I don't have any choice but to bang it out and turn it in and revise it. 'Cause he allows you a rewrite. But what I think we're getting at is that I don't really… I prefer to not revise. And I kind of subconsciously make myself not revise by procrastinating. So I procrastinate 'til the last minute and then I force myself into writing the whole paper all in one jump. And then that's it. So I make myself not revise. I don't know if that's what he was talking about, but…

Maria Madruga
You make yourself not revise.

Student
Yeah, uh-huh! I never give myself time to revise.

John Lovas
Many of the problems that come in in writing papers for college, are that students don't activate the thinking process soon enough. They procrastinate, they put it off to the last minute, and then they're under great pressure, not only time pressure, but psychic pressure. And all sorts of bad things happen, because you're trying to force your thinking in a very limited period of time.

Beverly Moss
I tell my students about things that happen to me as a writer because they have this idea that I sit down, I write it in one draft and it's perfect. So I talk to them about, or I bring in sometimes, the draft of an article. And I show them the first go at it and then the second go at it. And I show them what I finally sent in and what got published. And it's nothing remotely close to the first couple of go-rounds. I say, this is revision.

Teresa Redd
We have to distance ourselves from the writing. The best way to do that is in terms of time. Alright, you did a proofreading as soon as you finished writing, but then you let the paper sit overnight. Lo and behold, the next day you pick up the paper and you see things that you never saw the day before.

Charles Turner
In most cases students are pretty honest about their flaws. They know. And they'll turn in material and hopefully an instructor won't see it. But if an instructor does see it, it's been my experience when I confront them with it either with comments on the paper or they come in for, to my office… they generally have a feeling for what's wrong in their writing. And that's fun too when you call them on that.

Xavier Pino
That's funny because I don't revise very much, I don't do a lot of revision. My first draft is pretty much my final draft other than a few grammatical changes and… you know, a couple of semicolons and things like that.

Turner
Xavier is the kind of student I love to have in a classroom. He has a lot of life experience. He's the kind of student I would call a raw student and he comes in with all this excitement and enthusiasm but not necessarily the writing skills that he needs to have at this level. And response papers for that kind of student is very exciting because they just put it down in the way that they communicate and we can work with a student like that, we have that creativity that's there and help him refine it into maybe citing sources or maybe having a clearly defined thesis and organized paragraphs.

Pino
If anything stands out that much then I know that I have to make a correction but, I feel that… what initially comes out of my head…that's what comes out and if I revise it too much… I feel like I change…

Turner
He's going to have to get a little away from the free flow type writing and be a little more structured. Having his ideas organized, understanding what topic sentences are to his paragraphs. Having all the topic sentences relate to his thesis statement; those kinds of structural things are not quite there yet. But the ideas, the excitement, the enthusiasm is and that's the essence of a good creative writer…so more structure I would say…

Scott King
You've got to love the process of it. Writing isn't about turning in that sheet of paper; it's the actual act of writing. And part of that is re-writing and revising and taking a teacher's notes or a peer's notes or whoever and you know, loving that process, not looking at it, it's like exercise—you're not exercising—it's not now I've got a body, now I'm done. It's you're always exercising to stay healthy and I think it's the same thing with writing. And I think the best writers always are about just revising all the time.