This one:
It’s the other way round, for me. I hate writing by hand, and consider it to be work. When I’m finished writing my paper by hand, damned if I’m going to want to do all that work again. On the computer, though, it’s just a matter of printing it again, no physical writing required.
Well, did you read the rest of my post? I basically agreed with you.
That assumes there are any changes to be made, and that the teacher is willing to accept that the first draft may be the same as the final. The teacher may be insistent that some change needs to be made, goshdarnit, and from my experience they don’t always take a personal hand in the revision process, instead having other students make suggestions. If the student isn’t experienced or analytical enough, which is entirely probable, they may say they see no changes necessary, and that’s not good enough for the teacher.
I mean, I agree with your post too. But it doesn’t address the issue of a teacher who demands that the final draft be different from the first draft without actually offering any input themselves.
Yeah, good example. If you were writing that for a 10-year-old–and even if you hadn’t told anyone your were doing so, and even if your post were never seen by a 10-year-old–we would be able to know the audience by how you phrased things, word choice, and–what I find most interesting–the things you reference in order to make the writing “meaningful” or “convincing.”
Awesome. Thanks for teaching me something new! 
I always do several distinct drafts of a paper. That said, during my undergrad my undisciplined nature would often require me to do them all in one day. It’s just the way I write. If I spend too much time hopping through one draft and “fixing it,” it comes out disjointed, and I feel like it was pieced together from disparate parts. Drafts allow me to make the process of writing a series of complete thoughts, rather than a big pool I’m wading around in. The end result is a paper that has a consistent tone and flow. When I have more time to craft each draft, and more time between each draft, the quality of my writing almost always goes up. When I applied to graduate schools, the writing samples I chose to send were papers that I had actually made distinct drafts of over days/weeks, and before sending them out, I rewrote them again! It was definitely worth it.
Usually my first draft is little more than a chaotic outline, then I write a new one expanding some points a bit, maybe I’ll add more points or arguments, then I’ll spot some direction the paper has gone in that I didn’t originally plan and decide if I want to expand on it or not, and then after a couple of increasingly complex and more style conscious iterations, I will write the final draft in a “fresh” word document from the beginning (while consulting the previous one pretty closely).
I’m not saying once I write a sentence, it is not edited or reconsidered until the next draft. I’ll do all the stuff WhyNot described in her OP. But I always try to write at least my final draft fresh.
Oh, and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve written a draft that I really thought was great the night I wrote it, a final draft that flowed well and I didn’t have to work with anymore, only to read it some days later and suddenly find tons of things to correct, new points to make, better connections to draw, etc. etc.
Time away from a work can really help me, and that necessitates drafts for me.
I guess I just found better windmills to tilt at. I agree it’s pointless, but my opinion of a lot of schoolwork falls in that category. Maybe after you write the first draft, you could muck it up a little for something to turn in, then use the original as the final.
I think this teacher might still be doing a valuable service.
Let’s assume that your first draft isn’t perfect (it isn’t). Now assume that the teacher is trying to teach you the skill of ‘looking at your own drafts and seeing where they might improve’. Then she’s doing exactly the right thing - by not giving you any input, she’s forcing you to use your brain.
pdts
I can see some point in having drafts if and only IF there is access to an editor. But when there is no such thing? Or worse, when there is such a thing and the editor wants to see “every draft” and rejects the notion that you only wrote one?
I know there are people who are goal oriented, people oriented, process oriented and some other thing I never remember, but bloody hell, there is a difference between “oriented” and “stuck”!
pdts, this or less is the kind of information I got from my “writing” schoolteachers: “poor descriptions/presentation”. “How do I improve my descriptions/ presentation?” “Write better/prettier”. Right. Now excuse me while I go grab Grandpa’s sword from the mantle…
Well those are just bad teachers, based on that description. I was just trying to give an example of when saying ‘update this draft, no I won’t tell you how’ might be useful.
pdts
As a teacher of writing, I gotta say I strongly disagree. “I don’t like this, figure out why” is a lesson in frustration, not writing. When I go over essays with students, I might read their introduction out loud to them and ask them what they notice, but if they fail to notice something important I will ask leading questions if I think that will get them there and flat out tell them if I don’t think they are close enough for the Socratic approach to work (and sometimes they’ve noticed problems in their own work I hadn’t thought worth mentioning/hadn’t seen, but am glad to discuss).
I really think “submit a draft for a completion grade, get it back unread, redo it” is a total waste of time. I think drafting with an editor’s help is a tremendous learning tool. In my upper level English classes I would sometimes turn in drafts where whole paragraphs were missing, with only a bracketed note [I need to figure our how to prove X connects to Y] or I’d have questions directed at my professor [This evidence seems a little strained to me. Any idea how to make it stronger?]. In my best classes, I’d get back a paper with a couple pages of typed thoughts and notes in the margins. The process certainly helped me learn how to craft a very solid paper.
In my own classes, I can’t offer that kind of service: I have 120 AP English students (and another 50 AP economics kids, who take some time), but I am still really dedicated to the idea revision: not just rewriting, but really critically examining one’s own writing. Most essays start as an in-class essay. That’s the rough draft and it’s a test grade. Every other essay they have to reread (again, in class, so I know it’s done) and complete a self-analysis. This is after we have gone over example essays (from the AP website, not my kids), so they see a variety of successful and non-successful responses to the prompt.
Then, I make myself really available/offer significant incentives for them to to come in for individual conferences. It’s close to impossible to make an A in the course if you don’t (though you can easily still pass/even make a B). I offer additional incentives for then revising the essay on your own time.
I’ve found this method works very, very well to improve writing. Only about half come in for the individual conferences, and probably only a quarter come in an often as I’d like, but the ones that do really learn to look at their own writing and be their own editors. They also get better at analyzing writing by other people, which is a great bonus.
So I think drafting/reviewing/re-writing is essential to pushing yourself as a writer, but many people handle it poorly.
Not a good post, improve it.
I’m curious, Ms. JO. How do you handle in-class essays? Can the students use computers?
The reason I ask is that such essays were always the worst type of writing for me, as I often did not have time to complete them. While I would write papers the night before, it was hours of work. And it involves a lot of correction and revision, something verboten on in-class essays since we had to write in pen. Furthermore, to write legibly takes me much longer than typing, especially when I can’t erase a poorly written word.
I much preferred the way it was handled in non-English classes. You were graded for content, not structure or style. And I could use a dadblasted pencil. It seems the other way was the exact opposite of the drafting method we had been taught.
Well that’s just stupid. But what if you’d said,
‘today, pdts, we are learning the skill of critiquing our posts and improving them. So I want you to come back with your post improved in some way.’
That makes a lot of sense.
They have to be hand written, largely because that’s how they have to do it on the AP exam. I expect drafts, not polished essays: cross outs and abbreviations and misspellings are fine (for me and the AP test) and while a conclusion is nice if you have time for it, you won’t be penalized if you stop half-way through a body paragraph. I see arrows and notes that “this sentence goes here” or "new paragraph!!"all the time.
We do have 2 short (2-3 typed pages) papers a semester that they do at home, but not many. Revisions of in-class essays, which are optional but strongly encouraged, can be typed and they have as much time as they’d like. So kids who really just do much, much better with more time have options to shine. And of course any kids with special ed paperwork or a 504-qualifying disability gets the extra time they are entitled to.
I let my kids use a pencil, but grading content only wouldn’t really be English, would it? And in any case, structure and style are what make your content accessible. The number one reason I force kids to reread their essays and take every opportunity to read their essays aloud to them individually (and oh, it makes them squirm) is to show them that what they wrote was not what they had in their head, any more than a four year old’s drawing of his family looks how he thinks it does. When people learn to see what they actually wrote, they always discover the content is much weaker than they thought.
[Taken a bit out of order]
Nice! I don’t disagree. But it does make for easier writing when I can just rewrite the prompt as a thesis sentence and then immediately go on to support it. Not having to essentially plan out my paper ahead of time, think of a motivator and segue, all before I can start writing. Because, if I don’t, I won’t have time to go back and fix it. My best work requires a lot of skipping around.
I said that I wrote my college papers the night before, but I spent hours on them. My social life stopped: I went from the time I got off from my last class (usually around 3) until bedtime. Then I would proofread the next day before class, maybe change a word here or there, but not what I’d call revision. I’d save it, and print it out an hour or so before class.
How old are your students? Those short papers sound rather short. The shortest we ever did in any of the classes I can remember were 3-5 pages long.
Interesting philosophy. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about my writing being any different from what I think in my head. Sure, the finished paper is never quite like the paper I envisioned, but I don’t think I’ve ever looked back at my paper and been surprised by what it said, unless it’s been a significant amount of time, and I’ve misrepresented it in my memory.
I’m not saying I can’t go back and look at my work and see some obvious improvements I could make. I’m saying that I’m usually aware of the shortcomings when I write it and reread it before turning it in. I’ve turned in plenty of papers that I thought were crap but were apparently good enough. My problem with revising was that, if I didn’t finish the paper quickly, I would wind up revising it forever. That’s why I turned in almost complete papers as rough drafts. Otherwise I’d spend a lot more time on it for minimal gain.
I had horrible time management skills, and just lucked into the method I described above due to procrastination. Having someone whose job it is to critique my writing always made me nervous.
But, again, these are graded as drafts: they aren’t expected to have graceful transitions or be free of mistakes: they are just supposed to show organization and logical support of a tenable position.
High school juniors, albeit advanced ones. There’s only so much grading I can do, what with 120 English students (and another 50 Economics ones) and I find that more, shorter assignments leads to more improvement than fewer longer assignments. Remember that that is 4 2-3 page typed papers a year plus about 20 in-class hand written drafts, which are anywhere from 1-4 pages long (depending on the kid, the prompt, and the time in the year). So it’s a lot of writing by the time we are done. The advantage to long papers is they teach you how to write a sustained, complex argument, but the disadvantage is that if you are making a total fucking mess of it, you spend a lot more time spinning your wheels and learning nothing. I’d rather give them more opportunities to screw up and get corrected and try again than one or two big huge papers. If all you do is two huge papers a semester and the kid doesn’t get it AT ALL for the first one, they really only do one productive thing all semester. It’s not enough.
Have someone read it out loud to you. It can be really shocking (or you may be a strong enough writer that it’s not.) Often it’s like seeing yourself on camera: “I really look like THAT?”
I don’t think that makes sense at all if the student has put his or her best effort into the draft. You don’t become a better writer by simply deciding to, and then instantly having the ability to see the problems that a moment ago had eluded you, and instantly knowing how to solve them. If that’s the case, you would have done it “right” the first time.
The writing process is not only recursive–it’s interactive, in the sense that you draw upon an understanding of audience to to shape what you write. Most of the time, what developing writers need to improve most is a good sense of audience. In the classroom context, they can acquire this by fielding content-specific questions, that are strategically posed by the the instructor. It’s almost dialectical, or Socratic, in nature.
This feedback works like scaffolding, defining the shape which the writing needs to take. Mentally it is an extremely taxing kind of feedback to give. In fact, giving effective feedback to developing writers is much more difficult than doing the writing itself, and that’s why so few writing teachers actually do it. It’s either too mentally exhausting, or too time-consuming.
Yes, I agree that many–if not most–writing instructors give useless feedback. And that’s the simple truth. They write unhelpful things in the margin like, “awkward,” or “not clear,” or “please re-state,” or “explain”–things that give no clue of how to improve the writing. And they do this because teaching writing effectively is hard–really hard–and it can never be done in a simple, cursory or boiler-plate way. The feedback has to address the content of the writing, with questions such as, “How does A change B?” or “Why did so-and-so not do X?” or “Isn’t it possible that No. 2 actually causes No. 1? Why not?” or “Why can’t the opposite be true?,” etc.
Giving no feedback at all is just as unhelpful. When writing teachers give instructions like, “I want you to come back with your writing improved in some way…”, they are committing a grave and fatal error: They are assuming that the developing writer can see his own writing with the same eyes that the developed writer can.