Sommers, Nancy Revision Strategies

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” 43-55
“What is impossible in speech is revision: like the example Barthes gives revision in speech is an afterthought” (44).
“One reason, Barthes suggests, is that “there is a fundamental tie between teaching and speech.” While “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible.”6” The spoken word cannot be revised. The possibility of revision distinguishes the written text from speech” (45).
“Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering” (45).
“Lexical changes are the major revision activities of the students because economy is their goal. They are governed, like the linear model itself, by the Law of Occam’s razor that prohibits Logically needless repetition; redundancy and superfluity” (47).
“For the students, writing is translating: the thought to the page, the language of speech to the more formal language of prose, the word to its synonym” (47).
“By rewording their sentences to avoid the lexical repetition, the students solve the immediate problem, but blind themselves to problems on a textual level; although they are using different words, they are sometimes merely restating the same idea with different words” (48).
“Because students do not see revision as an activity in which they modify and develop perspectives and ideas they feel that if they know what they want to say, then there is little reason for making revisions” (48).
That’s true, but how do I explain to them that revising further is important? Why would it be?
“What they lack, however, is a set of strategies to help them identify the “something larger” that they sensed was wrong and work from there” (48).
“The students decide to stop revising when they decide that they have not violated any of the rules for revising. These rules, such as “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction” or Never end a sentence with a preposition,” are lexically cued and rigidly applied”(49).
“The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument” (50).
“Thus experienced writers say their drafts are “not determined by time,” that rewriting is a “constant process,” that they feel as if (they) “can go on forever” (50).
“But these revision strategies are a process of more than communication: they are part of the process of discovering meaning altogether” (51).
“The musical composition—a ‘composition’ of parts—creates its ‘key’ as in an over-all structure which determines the value (meaning) of its parts. The analogy with music is readily seen in the compositions of experienced writers: both sorts of composition are based precisely on those structures experienced writers seek in their writing. It is this complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in the work of experienced writers which destroys the linear model; writing cannot develop ‘like a line’ because each addition or deletion is a reordering of the whole” (51).
“But student writers constantly struggle to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers to the opposite: they seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with their writing, in revision. They seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity, the difference of meaning, the dissonance, that writing as opposed to speech allows in the possibility of revision (52).
“The writers ask: what does my essay as a whole need for form, balance, rhythm, or communication” (52).
“It is a sense of writing as discovery—a repeated process of beginning over again, starting out new—that the students failed to have” (53).