Well, like many of you all, I just finished my last draft for the "revision" assignment and I have to tell you that was hard. It was hard not because I have trouble analyzing materials, but because after four years of undergraduate work and two years of graduate work I have trouble needing four drafts to conclude a 3-5 page paper. Now, I still did the assignment and completed it to the best of my abilities, but I had to write the paper in its entirety and then cut and paste several drafts together.
One of the things I try to emphasize in my class is the difference between revision and editing. One focuses on content/ structure the other on mechanical/ format issues. I feel that this assignment, for students of our level, forces editing and not revision. I do not know how many others write the way I do, but I have 70% of a paper written in my head after about five weeks of thinking about it before I even write a word down. Now, I realize that our students may not all have that ability and that it may be foolish to assume they might, but if what is needed is multiple drafts focusing on content then why are graduate students being used? Why not use the very students in English 110 on a volunteer basis to produce several drafts of a paper. After all, Composing Ourselves is suppose to be for their benefit, why would the students be held to the examples of graduate level writers?
Now, I do appreciate the purpose of the assignment, do not think otherwise; I am a big advocate of examples in the classroom, but some of us really had trouble with this assignment because we simply do not write like this (anymore or have ever).
In fact, it has opened my eyes quite a bit to how I will deal with the drafting process in future writing classes. I have heard from many students that drafting is simply not how they write and I have a hard time looking at them and saying too bad because I know exactly how they feel.
I would love to hear other ideas on how to do be able to keep up with progress without requiring multiple drafts. If the intention is to catch plagiarism early, then there can be other methods of keeping up with the student's progress without a new draft every so often. Any ideas?
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3 comments:
I try to avoid plagiarism by assigning obscure topics to write about. I had the students do their textual analysis on sections from Composing Ourselves, for instance. If there's analysis of CO already out there to plagiarize, I give up!
As far as plagiarism goes, that's usually blatant enough to catch without the aid of multiple drafts, especially if it's the conscious kind rather than the result of inexperience with MLA.
I, too, have reservations about requiring multiple drafts. Last semester, I had a few very competent writers who told me they revised as they wrote and thus had only one draft to turn in. Since I also revise as I write, I understood and accepted their papers without qualm. This occurred late in the semester, after I had stopped giving them feedback on their rough drafts because I wanted them to learn to revise their own papers without depending on me. In this situation, I don't think multiple drafting should be an end in itself. It helps some and doesn't really apply to others, so why should we force it on everyone? After all, my "one" draft is really more like a 3rd or 4th draft minimum. I think it's okay to trust our competent students to work in a similar fashion.
Of course, if you're at the point in the semester when you're giving lots of feedback and/or peers are giving good feedback, then the writers who revise as they write will produce something pretty good for the workshop and something great for the final. Hence, multiple drafting is great when feedback is involved. At some point, though, I think students need to depend on themselves for feedback, in which case (like above) multiple drafting is just a "literalization" of what's taking place.
I write several drafts even for short papers. I don't think it's a grad student thing to not need multiple drafts, it's just a personality thing. I can't think through my ideas until I see them printed out.
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