Reaching an Actual Second Draft

To be honest, it's the lack of rewriting that brings me a sick sort of pleasure when it comes to reading student (and sometimes even "professional") writing. A few examples that my mother, teaching basic composition at the community college in my hometown, encountered. In one paper, the student commented that he "held a blind ear" (instead of turning a blind eye or deaf ear), clearly mixing idioms. Another stated that she was "cretin" (instead of "certain") her doctor would tell her about some sort of malady.

As humorous as this may be, I value the advice Lindemann gives about teaching students how to do revisions on their work. I especially appreciate her advice to work on teaching them that to rewrite a paper doesn't mean that you somehow failed at it. An example from my own work comes to mind, and this from only two semesters ago. I was left with the proposition of coming up with my own topic for a paper--one of those lovely assignments where you are told that it's "your own baby," or some such thing. Running into some time constraints and issues of needing to improve somewhat in this class, I wrote what I knew was an atrocious rough draft. Even with it being in a "draft" form, the one thing I knew coming out of writing it is that I had no idea what I was writing about.

That was also the consensus amongst the people I had read it to help me edit.

Rewriting that draft actually meant going through my first draft and discovering what my actual topic was going to be. It is more than fair to say that my second draft looked nothing like the first. Subsequent drafts were able to be far more focused since some larger concerns were taken care of.

Bringing this idea back to students, as I have helped tutor students I have seen where the general idea is that rewriting only means changing sentence-level things. Whenever I start talking about problems I see in their overall arguments, or if I point out where they have strayed off topic, it seems as if I'm talking to a brick wall for the expressions they give me. It is only through much work that they start to see how their writing improves by being flexible with structure, content, and sentence formation.

Lindemann's chapter has at least given me some ideas as to how I might proceed in helping students break through their barriers. The most important thing I can see is that, as much as talking helps, the students need to see rewriting in practice, but that seems like it may be a topic for another post.