When my first-year writing students say to me, “Why do I have to revise? I think my first draft is good.” I reply, “Why do you want to settle for good enough?”
When the writing teachers I mentor ask, “What do you do when a student turns in a really good first draft?” I say, “I ask more complicated questions of the text.”
I say these things to students and the teachers I work with because as a writer I know that revision is part of the writing process, and because I believe no text is ever really done. For me, a piece of writing is “done” when I have run out of time to continue working on it or, in the case of my novel, I couldn’t bear to look at it one more minute. I also know that shifting something in the rhetorical situation (my thinking about something has changed, a different audience now makes sense, a different purpose) always cries out for a revision. Every text can be endlessly revised.
But I’m wondering if something else is being implied here, if there is something else behind these questions the students and teachers ask. I’m wondering if we need to re-think what we mean by drafting.
I’ve been thinking that students and even teachers (okay I’ll admit it—even I have thought this) believe that drafting is only for those who can’t get it right the first time. Really good writers get it right the first time and really bad writers have to do a bunch of drafts until they can get it right. (Okay, I’ll admit it. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent crying at my desk because I had to do yet another draft in order to get it “right.”)
I understand why our students come into our classes believing this. We are surrounded by writing “myths” that support this. Good writers are born talented, good writers get inspired. Good writers have the words, the sentences, the paragraphs pour effortlessly out of their fingers and onto the page. Bad writers struggle.
The implication here is that no matter what we write there is a perfect text – the perfect essay, the perfect seminar paper, the perfect article—and we are trying to achieve this “perfect” text as quickly as possible.
But what is a perfect text?
Is there a perfect text?
Students come into our classrooms thinking that for each of the essay units there is an A+ essay and this writing process we ask them to go through is a way that enables them to achieve that paper. And although we try to convince our students that the process we teach them isn’t really about this and that revision is something all writers do, I’m thinking that the way we ask students to draft may just undermine what we are saying. I’ve been thinking that we may just reinforce this notion of the perfect text by asking students to write a draft that looks and is in the same shape as their final essay. Although we expect everything to be “rough” (Just get your ideas down! Don’t worry about your grammar – yet!) the assumption is the first draft with its “rough” introduction, “rough” body paragraphs, “rough” conclusion, is just a “rough” version of what the final draft will eventually look like. We then start working from that draft and begin the revising process usually keeping the same structure, usually pointing out where things can be further developed, added, deleted, and moved around. Each draft then becomes a version of the previous draft. And because these multiple drafts look the same, students become locked into re-arranging what is already there.
So I’ve been thinking. What if we re-thought this whole drafting thing? What if the drafts looked different? What if each draft looked so different that the point of revision was to write something different? What if we thought more about what specific purpose each draft could serve?
For example, last semester for our “Adding to the Conversation” unit I asked the students to begin by writing a draft that was one page discussing everything they already knew about their topic, and one page discussing everything they had discovered. For Draft #2 the students selected a specific audience for their topic and wrote a letter to a member of that audience. For Draft #3 the students selected a form that was best suited to their audience and wrote their draft in that form. The final draft was a copyedited version of Draft #3.
How was this different?
Rather than asking students to select their audience, purpose and form in the beginning of the writing process, I broke it down. The purpose of the first draft was to enable the students to get everything they knew and learned about their topics down. Rather than attempting to weave their research in with their own voices right away this enabled them to separate everything out so they could see what they were thinking. On this draft we did revision exercises to enable them to develop their own purpose and to explore different audiences. Once they decided on an audience, the letter (Draft #2) enabled them to speak directly to that audience, to test out what they wanted to say. This enabled them to think further about their purpose and to identify points where they needed to do further research. Once they settled on their purpose and audience, they revised (Draft #3) into a form that seemed best suited for their specific audience. This draft was revised for content, sentence structure, and mechanical/grammar issues into the final version.
Did this work?
I think so. I saw the students taking up the idea of revision in a more global way because since each draft was different they could not simply add, delete, or move existing paragraphs around. I also found that they were more open to possible directions for their final papers because they were not attached to any particular draft during the process. The students didn’t really see that they were writing the same thing over and over. Instead they were writing their way to a final paper.
Could their final versions have been revised a few more times? Of course. More focusing on the overall structure would have been great, some points could have been developed a bit more, some focus on sentence structure would have been beneficial. But right now I’m wondering if thinking more about what specific purpose each draft could serve within the writing process and making that purpose visible may enable students to focus on writing their way to the essay they want to write rather than attempting to get it right in one shot.