Why I Don’t Edit Their Rough Drafts

Why I Don’t Edit Their Rough Drafts

Like most professors who teach composition, I require my students to write multiple drafts — three, in fact — of each essay. That’s not because three is a magic number. It’s just a number that fits well with the amount of time we have in the semester, and it reinforces the idea of working through multiple drafts. If there is a "secret" to good writing, I’m convinced, multiple drafts is it.

And, like most of my colleagues, I regularly have students work in "peer editing" or "workshopping" sessions where they read and offer comments on one another’s work.

None of this is groundbreaking pedagogy. In fact, it’s pretty standard fare for a college-level writing course.

What I don’t do, however — unlike most of my colleagues — is read all of my students’ rough drafts before they turn in a final paper for a grade. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I don’t edit any of their drafts, because I actually do end up reading a fair number. But I don’t mark up each and every draft, and return it for revision.

That’s enough of a departure from classroom norms that I can well imagine a lot of raised eyebrows at this point: "How can you not edit your students’ drafts? What do you do with them, then?" My approach is a calculated strategy, designed to accomplish certain specific goals.

Workload management. Some readers may assume I’m just lazy — declining to read and edit students’ drafts because it’s simply too time-consuming. While I would dispute the first part of that statement — what you call "laziness," I would characterize as "workload management" — I do agree wholeheartedly with the second. Editing students’ essays would, indeed, require many additional hours (that I don’t have). More important, it’s also unnecessary and even counterproductive.

But first let’s run the numbers. Most semesters, I teach five composition courses, with 20 to 24 students apiece. They each write five essays, so I’m grading more than 500 essays every semester. Obviously that takes a lot of time. There’s no way I could read, edit, and grade three times that many essays and still be able to fulfill my other professional responsibilities, not to mention have a life.

My rule is that I will read specific passages, and answer specific questions. But I won't read and edit an entire draft. That way, they learn to be their own editors. 

If I were going to edit students’ rough drafts, I’d have to cut back on the number of papers they write (assign three instead of five) and probably cut back, too, on the number of drafts (two instead of three). Or I could use some version of the portfolio method, requiring students to continually revise the same two or three essays throughout the semester — as I know some of you do. That’s a legitimate approach, and I have no problem with it.

Personally, however, I prefer to have students write more essays so we can cover a variety of genres. I also believe it’s better for students to learn from their mistakes on an essay, put that one behind them, and move on to the next, rather than reworking the same piece until they (and I) are sick of it. (In lieu of a final exam, I allow students to revise one of their earlier essays and resubmit it for a higher grade.)

An audience they care about. One of the biggest obstacles to teaching writing skills is the inherent artificiality of the college environment. The classroom, after all, is not the real world. Nowhere else, outside of a classroom, do we find people writing essays for a grade.

An employee writing a report for a boss seems similar but there’s a key difference: That boss might do any number of things with the report — praise it, ignore it, take credit for it, demand that it be rewritten. But one thing she won’t do is mark it up with red ink and put a C- at the top. And that changes everything.

The pioneering composition scholar Donald Murray once observed that many composition mistakes simply disappear when writers care about their audience. When I first read that — some 30 years ago as a graduate student — I thought it couldn’t possibly be true. Why would "caring" make errors go away? I have learned over the years, however, that Murray was exactly right: One of the keys to clear writing is a sincere desire for your audience to be able to understand what you’re saying.

One of the best things I can do for my students, then, is to provide them with an audience that they just might care about. Clearly, that’s not me; they don’t care a whit about communicating with me, one human being to another. From me they only care about getting a good grade, which experience has taught them means minimizing errors — something that, paradoxically, makes them more error prone. (That’s something all performers, from ballet dancers to closing pitchers, understand intuitively: You’re much more likely to screw up if you’re focused on not screwing up rather than on getting the job done.)

One of the main purposes of the workshopping is to provide students with a realistic audience of their peers — a group of people with whom they might actually wish to communicate. And one of the reasons I don’t edit their drafts beforehand is so that students know their peer group will be the first to read what they’ve written.

Over time, students begin to write for each other — not for me — which leads to better writing.

Teacher versus editor. In recent years, I’ve done a fair amount of freelance editing — something quite different from teaching. The aim of an editor is to "fix" a piece of writing and make it suitable for publication — not necessarily to teach the writer how to do better next time (although that may be an important byproduct).

A teacher’s main goal, on the other hand, is not to improve a particular essay but rather to help students grow and improve as writers. In that process, it is vital for them to learn from their mistakes and their successes — to find out for themselves, with our guidance, what works and what doesn’t. Ideally, students will begin to make connections and recognize grammatical, structural, and thematic issues on their own.

That’s less likely to happen if you as the instructor simply mark the errors, make some comments, and hand the paper back for the student to fix. In that scenario, students have no need to look critically at their essays; they know you are going to do it for them. Students are unlikely to make any changes beyond the ones you have suggested. In that scenario, they aren’t learning much, they are simply exhibiting a Pavlovian response.

My rule is that I will read specific passages, upon request, and answer specific questions. But I won’t read and edit an entire draft. That way, I make clear — by my actions, as well as my words — that they must learn to be their own editors and that they are ultimately responsible for the form and content of their essays.

The challenge here is that reading like an editor differs significantly from reading for information or enjoyment. Editing involves far more than just "fixing mistakes," or what you or I would call "proofreading." It requires seeing what’s on the page while constantly thinking about what could have been on the page instead. It requires us to juggle, in our minds, multiple scenarios, in terms of diction, sentence structure, organization, and so forth.

That kind of thinking does not come naturally to most of us, and certainly not to most students. We have to train ourselves to do it. And what better way to help students develop that cognitive skill than to regularly put them in a position where they have to apply it, or at least attempt to? That, to me, is the main benefit of having students workshop their rough drafts in small groups: Students are, more or less, forced to think like editors.

Most of them aren’t very good at it, at least at first, but they become more comfortable and adept. I start each workshop session with a 10-to-15-minute training module on some aspect of editing, helping them understand what to look for. By the end of the course they’ve become better at editing each other’s work and, more important, their own.

All of those potential benefits are negated if we simply fix everything that’s wrong with rough drafts. Students don’t learn to improve their own writing, nor do they reap the rewards of helping others improve. Call me lazy, if you like, but that’s why I don’t edit students’ drafts for them — and why I believe you shouldn’t, either.

For Montaigne Class

To go with book on Montaigne and Montaigne's book, itself:

http://www.oxfordmuse.com

If you go back and reread the first chapter of How To Live, the reason why you're linking to the Oxford Muse website will make sense.

We Know What Works in Teaching Composition (Doug Hesse)

We Know What Works in Teaching Composition

When I came to the University of Denver to start a campus writing program in 2006, I heard many faculty members say, "A lot of my students can’t even write a decent sentence." So when I read Joseph Teller making much the same assertion in an essay last fall, "Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?" I recognized hyperbole when I saw it.

My response to that sort of exaggeration 10 years ago — joined by my 20 new colleagues in the writing program — was to gather and analyze a corpus of 500,000 words of student writing from classes across the campus. We found that, in fact, well over 90 percent of the sentences coded clear and error free.

Faculty members wanted to see better student writing (and I surely acknowledged and valued that desire), but it was clear that merely fixing sentences wasn’t going to achieve that end. There were larger issues: Students needed help developing and deploying their ideas and matching their writing with the expectations of various disciplines. Those things, we could work on.

Complaints about the state of student writing have a long lineage. In 1878, Adams Sherman Hill, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, famously protested: "Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders which would disgrace a boy twelve years old." Hill and others devised pedagogies grounded in their own experiences and in common sense — though one man’s common sense was another man’s folly.

Teaching grounded in actual research took a scholarly turn in 1950, marked by the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Its journal is now the leading one in the field. By 1963, research on what worked in teaching writing — and what didn’t — had accumulated to a point that a synthesis was published, "Research in Written Composition."

Roughly 25 years later, George Hillocks conducted a new analysis (Research on Written Composition), using studies published in the intervening years. Since then, peer-reviewed research on the best ways to teach college writing has accumulated in dozens of books and well-established journals — including College Composition and Communication, Written Communication, College English, the Journal of Teaching Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Studies, Writing Program Administration, and the Journal of Writing Assessment, to name but a few.

A 2005 article, "The Focus on Form vs. Content in Teaching Writing," analyzed why formalist approaches — like the back-to-basics kind that Professor Teller advocates — remained so popular in teaching composition, despite overwhelming empirical evidence that they were significantly less effective than other methods.

The teaching of writing happens — or should — within a deep field of practice, theory, and research. It’s also an enterprise marked by a fair amount of what Steve North, in a 1987 book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, called teaching "lore." Lore consists of ideas and assumptions that are grounded in local experience ("what worked for me") and then passed along informally, for the most part, from one faculty member to the next. Lore is sometimes informed by research, and thus transmutable and generalizable, but more often it is not.

Teller’s essay participates in the tradition of lore. Not having been in his classes or having read his students’ work, I can’t judge his local experience, but I can judge how well his approach compares with the most effective national practices.

For example, his assertion, "Substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses," might speak for his own classroom, but it surely doesn’t speak for mine or those of thousands of other professors. Consider his claim that students "do not use the basic argumentative structures they need." Again, while perhaps true of students in Teller’s own classes, that broad claim is unsubstantiated by my experience, by research on my campus, or by the wider literature in the field.

Where Teller departs most from actual scholarship in the discipline is his claim that "pedagogical orthodoxy" assumes that "composition courses must focus on product, not process." He could hardly be more wrong.

The two most dominant pedagogies today in college composition each focus on product as well as process. Genre approaches have students learn features that readers expect in specific kinds of writing (lab reports, op-eds, business proposals, magazine feature articles, movie reviews, and so on). Rhetorical approaches have students analyze the kinds of evidence, structure, and style that will be effective for particular purposes (for example, to persuade, inform, or entertain), for particular groups of readers (experts, novices, or people of particular viewpoints), and in particular situations. Both methods make significant use of model readings and examples.

One key to both approaches is sustained, guided practice. On that point, Teller and I surely agree. Students learn to write by writing, by getting advice and feedback on their writing, and then writing some more. What can be told to college students about writing can probably be encapsulated in a lecture of two or three hours. It parallels what meaningfully can be told about playing piano — the music notation, the relationship between notation and keyboard, the hand and finger placement, the posture, the pedal functions.

But without sustained practice on systematically more complex pieces ("Chopsticks" is not a Rachmaninoff concerto), the world’s best lectures will not — cannot — make a pianist. So, too, with writing.

Here is what this looks like in the best writing courses, informed by decades of research:

• Students have ample opportunities to write. Professors expect them to write frequently and extensively, and we demand and reward serious effort.
• Professors carefully sequence writing tasks. The idea is progressively to expand on students’ existing abilities and experiences.
• Professors coach the process. We offer strategies and advice, encouragement and critique, formative and summative assessments.
• Courses provide instruction and practice on all aspects of writing. Attend to the form and conventions of specific genres? Yes. Talk about creativity, invention (how to generate ideas), grammar, and style? Certainly, but also discuss things like logic and accuracy in writing, and how to fit a piece to various audience needs and expectations.
• Courses use readings not only as context and source materials (which is vital in the academic and civic spheres) but also as models — and not only static models of form but also as maps to be decoded as to how their writers might have proceeded, why, and to what effect.
• Professors teach key concepts about writing in order to help students consolidate and transfer skills from one writing occasion to the next. But we recognize that declarative knowledge is made significant only through practice and performance (see Bullet No. 1).
• Student writing and student writers are the course’s focus. Everything else serves those ends.

Lore is a form of knowledge in every field. In pointing to the best practices of teaching writing — indicated by extensive research in composition studies — I don’t ignore the experience of individual teachers like Teller.

However, I can’t let pass unchallenged general claims about the way "we" are "wrongly" teaching composition, especially when they so dramatically misrepresent, even ignore, the field they would aspire to correct.

Doug Hesse is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor and the executive director of writing at the University of Denver. He previously served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.