Blog #5: Lindemann and Rewriting

Rewriting, Lindemann writes that the term is often thought of as "dirty" (189), and I think that is true. Specifically, Lindemann's assertion students only see rewriting as "...rewording, approaching the process with what she calls a 'thesaurus philosophy of writing' (190) rings true to my own process. I think I approached rewriting as "rewording" as Lindemann suggests because I was so hesitant to destroy hours of work and to get rid of words that might not help my argument. Even now, whenever I write I keep an open word document for orphan sentences, words, or paragraphs. I guess, I just want a place for my words to live even if I don't use them all the time. Yes, I still use the thesaurus to find the right words when I write a paper, but I don't necessary abstain from deleting or excluding passages that I have spent hours on. I think at this point of my writing process, my mind immediately begins to look for a shape and a form for how I want to present my work. As a child, I think my revision process was a solitary one, or one that I only shared with close friends (by which I mean one). I hated the peer editing process. I didn't like having other people 'edit' my work, or more specifically I feared other people 'judging' my work. Even today, as a supplemental instructor, I constantly hear students hate peer editing because they don't trust the grammar editor credentials of their fellow peers. If this is the case, then how can we make peer editing more productive? Why do we insist on using this strategy? Should we just follow the strategies from Elbow-Belanoff? Center of gravity? Pointing? Sayback? Metaphorical Feedback? If these strategies were effective, why are students not familiar with them already? What's happening in the elementary, middle, or high school English classroom where peer editing was enforced and thus, soured students' mouths? I think there is some value in these strategies, but I would like to see examples and concrete activity models of how these are used in the classroom. More than that, how did I change from looking to reword passages to looking for shape for my formal writing process? When and how does this change occur in a student?