I posted a brief thing about this on my Fb page today, but I want to talk about it more fully, and y’all are due for a “real” post from me, so here we go.
I am teaching “honors” comp for the second time this semester, and so I’m starting to be able to trace some trends about the “issues” that come up that are different from the “issues” of “regular” comp students. And what follows is one of them.
In order to get into “honors” comp, students have to attain a minimum ACT score, so this means that they come in as generally proficient writers. I don’t typically have to work with them on massive problems with grammar and punctuation, and I don’t spend a whole lot of time on defining “the paragraph” or things like that. This is exciting: it means that I actually get to teach about style and the benefits of revision when it comes to “polishing” as opposed to “fixing.” In that regard, teaching my little freshmen to write is actually more of a treat than teaching some of my English majors to write: these students come in with a “toolbox” that is already pretty much full, so it’s not about giving them the tools so much as it is about showing them how to use tools that they already have.
That said, this doesn’t mean that they have nothing to learn about writing, or nothing to learn about the writing process. So a certain frustrating problem has come up with some frequency for me, and I think it might just be the nature of teaching students who have always done pretty well with writing: they feel like they are getting something “wrong” if they need to revise, and they tend (to some extent) to blame me for them getting it “wrong” – they think that I have some secret agenda that I’m not communicating to them if they need to invest themselves in their papers.
(I don’t have some secret agenda: it’s all right there in the assignments that I give them and in the instruction that I give them in class. All peer review and my draft comments do is break down what is all already written in the assignment sheet into its component parts. My assignment sheets are comprehensive, and they have bullet points, y’all. There is no mystery. And part of what I’m teaching them is how to read a freaking assignment sheet and to interpret it in order to respond to it with good results.)
Let me be clear: my frustration isn’t with this subset of students – and it is by no means all of them, though it is a fair percentage – has nothing to do with them being “lazy.” They are not “lazy.” They just interpret having to invest time and energy in their work as a personal failure. Even if that investment ultimately pays off in a “good” grade. (And by “good” I mean a grade in the A-range.)
So, for example, in a conference with a student today, zie expressed frustration because zie had worked for “two hours” on hir draft for peer review, and after going through the peer review process, getting feedback both from hir peers and from me, the student had to “spend another four hours” working on the essay (a 4-6 page rhetorical analysis), a process that zie described as “scrapping the whole thing and starting over.”
Now, here’s the thing: the student didn’t scrap the whole thing and start over. Zie took that first draft, reorganized the ideas that zie had already included, cut out some sentences that didn’t advance the argument and expanded on some points that zie hadn’t fully developed originally. Now, to me, that sounds like a textbook definition of what revision should include, and it sounds like a success story. But the student perceived it as “getting it wrong” on the draft, and as needing to respond to (my) arbitrary demands for the final version. So it’s not that the student didn’t work hard (zie did) nor that the student didn’t produce a very useful “shitty first draft” (zie did – and really, I wouldn’t even call it “shitty”). But the student’s expectations for what “success” is (I will write a draft in two hours and it will be perfect with only minor adjustments to make – a comma here, a fixed typo there) don’t align with the expectations for a final draft of a sophisticated, fully developed essay for college (you need to invest a bunch of time after your initial version to really present your ideas in the most effective way possible).
Now, some observations:
- 6 hours total spent on a 4-6 page paper that ultimately receives a grade in the A-range seems like not very much time to spend, particularly when the students didn’t have any additional outside-of-class reading or writing assignments for the week before the final version was due – and they even had some in-class time to work together in groups on ideas and approaches, guided by a worksheet. In other words: the student, who is taking a course worth three credit hours spent two hours for every hour spent in the classroom. This perfectly aligns with what we tell students they should expect in college (and is actually far below what we often expect of them as they move into upper-level courses, in which they usually have reading in addition to a paper assignment in a given week).
- Some of the problem is the messages that the student received from hir high school AP English teacher about how to write to do well on the AP test. Good advice, it turns out, for doing well on that test. So I spent some time today talking to this student about how test rubrics look for certain things, and so the high school teacher wasn’t “wrong” – in fact, I advise students in similar ways who are preparing for the writing section of the GRE who want to go to graduate school. But just because you are doing good “writing for the test” writing doesn’t mean that you are doing good writing. It means that you are adequately meeting the needs of a particular rubric (one reason why I hate rubrics, as a teacher of writing, actually: sophisticated transitions and complex sentence structures and original and engaging style don’t often neatly correspond to rubrics that are applied universally) which will give you a particular result. Should you be able to adjust your writing to a particular rubric (or audience) for particular reasons? Sure. But that doesn’t mean that you are writing “perfectly” when you do. So part of this is an audience issue.
- This student clearly cares about doing well, and this student clearly wants to do college “right.” That’s awesome. But doing it “right” and doing it “exceptionally well” are not the same thing. “Exceptionally well” takes more than two hours. Also: doing it “exceptionally well” means more than just generally responding to an assignment in a less than original way.
- I myself was this sort of a student at certain times in my academic career, so I totally identify with feeling pissed off that “all my work” wasn’t enough. I get it, really and truly.
But so at any rate, this post isn’t so much a complaint as a question: do you all face similar issues with otherwise “strong” students? How do you communicate to them that having to work and doing the work is a success and not a failure? In other words, is there something that I’m missing here (part of me really thinks this is just a phase and that by the end of the course the student will “get it”) about how to address this frustration (students’ frustration as well as my own?)?
But let me conclude:
I have a student – a STEM major no less! – who is rocking every assignment. Like, perfect responses. This student takes every paper to the writing center, in addition to doing the peer review in class, and in addition to coming to check in with me about questions zie has after all of that during my office hours. And the student’s drafts are pretty much A-range work before all of that. I am a notoriously tough grader: I have given this student A+ grades on the first two assignments. This. Has. Never. Happened. In. The. History. Of. My. Career. Zie is a first-year student. I would read an essay by this student every day for the rest of my life if I could do so. I mean really: zie is a delight – like a special present for me as a teacher. I want to make zie an English major just because I feel like zie would think about all things awesomely and write about them all awesomely. On the other hand, I don’t want zie to be an English major because I want zie to follow hir own path. I am trying very hard not to push zie in a direction that is not hir own.
I also have another student – a [insert specialization here] management major – who is vaguely earnest and inappropriate, but very creative! – who isn’t a super A++ but who is working super hard and who clearly is very creative and excited about hir writing. Zie spends hours and hours on hir papers, and wants to spend even more!
In other words, not all students think that the more work they put in the suckier they are. Some of them like that they are being challenged and pushed and they don’t view being asked to do more work as a negative review.
I give these last examples to be clear: this is NOT a “students suck” post. This is a genuine question: how do I get them to see that when I ask them to revise, when I ask them to do more, it’s because I believe in them? Is that an attainable goal to have for all of my students? Or do some just need time to realize that this is true?
I’m teaching an honors course for the first time this semester, and I only have one students who is upset at the revision process. I think I’ve managed to avoid having this be a bigger issue because the “frame” for the class at my university is that we’re supposed to be introducing students to the type of research and thinking professors do–we’re supposed to be introducing the driving questions that haven’t been answered and are still being debated, and we’re also supposed to show them the type of research we do. This meant that one of the things I did right before their first paper assignment was gave them my last published article (which is directly related to the topic of the course) and talked about my revision process, how my thinking evolved through writing, and how getting peer review helped me in that process. This particular article went through something like 42 drafts, so I showed them pieces of drafts 1, 6, 12, 37, and all of draft 42 (the final version of the article). At that point, asking them to do 2-3 drafts made it seem like they were getting off easy.
I don’t have an answer to that, but I think part of the problem is the idea that ‘creativity’ and ‘genius’ are innate, so should just emerge naturally first time in. And I think that writing (especially upper level writing, once they have the foundations) seems to be a ‘creative’ subject, not a ‘scientifc’ learn all the bits and you will succeed type endeavour. It’s a bit like people who think they can write great literature without having to read anybody else- failing to recognise that literature recognises genre and is referential and the like. So, part of the frustration that the student has with you is that you don’t see that genius, and is probably a form of frustration with themselves for not being able to ‘let that genius out’. The idea that genius might be something that has to be worked on seems to go against the very idea of what it means.
So I guess if I have a suggestion, it might be to tell them that creativity is a process of labour. A good comparative metaphor might be painting, where painters usually have large numbers of sketches and drafts and bits worked out, before they create the masterpiece. They don’t just walk up to a blank canvas and produce genius first time. Although I’m not sure whether a good metaphor will overcome such a strong cultural belief…
Sapience, thanks for your comment. I think that “frame” totally helps – I mean, I try to give them a version of that narrative, but it’s not the frame for the course at my institution. What you describe about showing them your own work is something I do with my upper-level courses in the major, but it just wouldn’t be appropriate in the context of comp at my institution, so that’s part of where I’m stuck. On the one hand, I’m supposed to be teaching them higher-order writing stuff, but on the other hand, there’s no frame for that. Also: they can take honors comp even if they aren’t honors students, based on their ACT writing score, so not all “honors” students are really “honors” students, if you see what I’m saying. Again, this is not something that I think is something to fault the students for, nor is it something that I think is ultimately insurmountable. But it is a frustration for me, and one that I don’t actually experience when teaching “regular” students, who have less confidence in their ability to “get it right on the first try”.
FA – Yes, and yes. I do try to explain that about creativity being about process and not genius, but some of them respond well to that and others… well, they either don’t get it or resist it. If last semester was any indication, they will actually get it by the end of the course. Which is the good news. The bad news is that I need to confront the issue at midterm with them not getting it or refusing to get it. Ah well, learning is a process, just like writing is
Flavia was just talking about this kind of pushback on Ferule and Fescue, only with older male students who aren’t strong writers. I think you’re doing the right thing pushing “different.” Being able to write for different audiences is a very good skill to have.
I love the 42-draft example. I have some of those! My grad students sometimes complain about spending 2-4 hours on an assignment and I’ll be shocked and say I’m not giving enough homework because they’re supposed to be spending 6 hours outside of class on each assignment.
I wonder how much they’ve been taught process before. If they were the strongest writers in their high school classes, it’s possible they churned out whatever and it was good enough to get them a high grade. And if the teacher was putting out subject verb agreement fires, good enough might have been good enough.
Do you know Anne Lamot’s essay “Shitty First Drafts”? It’s very short, but really brings home the point that rough drafts are for revision.
I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be appropriate to show them a draft of one of your essays? Maybe a conference essay, so something shorter, that’s maybe a little easier to follow since you’d have aimed it for reading aloud?
There are also pdfs out there in the webz of ms by Hemingway and such, showing how much he revised and changed stuff. That can be useful, I think.
Sounds like a problem, but a useful problem to have. Let us know what you come up with, please.
What Anastasia said. In high school and the first year or two of undergrad, I got in the habit of turning out a good enough first draft to get an A, so it was frustrating when I reached a point where I couldn’t do that anymore.
I also had gotten the idea that there was One True Right Way to write things. Then one semester I had a really good writing instructor who treated writing like play, and encouraged us to experiment, and introduced me to the idea that there were more than one way to do things and I should try stuff and see what worked best.
After that, I polled professors in my major about the tactics they used during researching. I had been taught to make a 3×5 index card file and that this was the One True Right Way to record notes for a research paper. But then I discovered that in real life there were as many different ways to do it as there were professors.
And it was only then that I started to feel okay about experimenting, and about revising, and about writing as a process.
I’d like to second several of the comments, especially those by Sapience and Feminist Avatar.
I’ve used a modified version of Sapience’s strategy in my non-honors comp at a regional SLAC with lots of 1st genand not-great students). I use myself as a writer as an example (with a lot of humility and emphasis on all the shitty first [and 2nd and 3rd] drafts I’ve gone through). I show students (by projecting) a section of a paper I’m working on and I’ll show them the successive revisions that section. They don’t have to really read the draft; they just need to see all the marking up and changing I do (which I’ll sometimes use highlighting to code). I tell them about my writing group, so they know “peer workshopping” isn’t just something I make them do for fun. (I pass around the copies my group members wrote on.) And I’ll tell them I do all this *in spite* of having a PhD (ie, 7yrs of training + the BA plus whatever since). The “good writers” get the message that it *always* takes revision, and the less strong (sometimes bad) writers get the message (I think) that they have access to improvement.
In terms of the genius/innate talent expectation, I’ve tried to shift away from that a bit. It’s a really deeply grounded myth, and they don’t have a lot of reason to believe me (do they *see* Leo diCaprio sweating his way through rehearsals?). Instead, I talk about writing as a skill and use sports as an analogy: no one would expect to walk onto a soccer field/bball court for the first time and be an awesome player. It takes years and years of practice to refine the skills, and even when you’re a pro athlete, you still have to practice daily. (It helps that there are a lot of student-athletes at my institution.)
I have on occasion gotten this kind of pushback from trainees in my lab when we revise their research manuscripts or grant applications: Why didn’t you tell me in the first place that we were going to reorganize this shitte in this way, and I would have written it that way in the first place? You made me waste my time on that earlier draft!
The answer is, of course, that this represents a severe misconception about the process of writing. The path from first draft to middle drafts to final draft is not a linear progression of steady improvement. Almost always, the route to the final draft does not become apparent unless and until the specific ways in which earlier drafts are fucked uppe reveal themselves. And the only way those revelations occur is to generate the fucked uppe earlier drafts.
Even if you write an entire paragraph, and then cross it out completely because you realize that the topic of that paragraph is bullshitte or outside the scope of the piece you are composing, that is far from wasted time. The only way to tell that the paragraph was shitte was to have written it, considered it, and then discarded it.
I went to an excellent high school, where I learned to write well. Though I placed out of my writing “requirement” in college and majored in Economics, I took ten writing courses there. I went to law school, where I aced the required legal writing, then took 5 more hard-to-find electives that required extensive writing. When I went to work at a top law firm in Manhattan, every time I wrote a legal brief, it was returned to me with more red than black ink on the page. I then began to write the first drafts of public offering documents, which were reviewed by three dozen lawyers, bankers, accountants and company executives. There would rarely be any traces of my original draft in the final product. I treasured every single one of these interactions in which better writers than me taught me how to improve. When I launched my own Website, I hired a group of writers right out of college. I edited all of their initial submissions to be sure they understood what I wanted. I later learned that some of them referred to my editing their work as “being hazed.”
I talk about my own revision process a lot, which typically involves completely redrafting (actually retyping the paper from scratch, which makes me much more free in my revision, much less attached to my first version).
And for a class like yours, I might even say, sure my first draft was ‘good enough to publish.’ But just because some people will accept my mediocre work and think it’s good, that doesn’t mean I don’t know better. If I’m going to put my name on something and put it out in the world, I owe it to myself to make it the best damn version of that paper / story / etc. that I can, at least given the time and space allowed. Otherwise I’m going to be embarrassed to read it, a few years down the line.
And then I might remind them, gently, how much time they’re expected to put in on these papers.
I try to model for my students how vital revision is – “see this chapter that I published here?” (Show screenshot of lovely, crisp, type-set title page.) “Here’s the first revisions for the chapter back from the volume editor.” (Project first page of document showing all the red mark-up and comments.) “And that was after I’d done my own revisions.”
You’re right that many students see a challenge to their writings through asking them to restructure and revise as a challenge to their self-worth. It’s not that they’re lazy, yes – it’s that their image of themselves is tied up in getting it right the first time. Writing when it’s just blowing words onto a page?, is exhilarating. Revision is slow, changes are minute, word-counts slowly creep up or down: it rarely results in that same buzz that running off 1000 words at a go provides.
I, too, have some awesome STEM students. One is currently blowing away an upper-level class with a paper on a science-topic in an early modern cultural context. The student’s proposal included archival material out of the U.K. I asked the student where those came from and was amazed – they appear in our nursing/health sciences database. I’d likely never have seen them if not for the student’s work.
What’s also great about STEM students is that few are of the belief that they will get anything “right” the first time. Their projects and coursework includes labs that aren’t only carried out at the bench but then are written up and later analyzed. What you learn in class only sticks with you through lots of swotting and focused review sessions. When you approach more of your coursework from that perspective, the expectation that your writing will be revised is a lot less scary or suggestive of personal failing.
It helps to know that you have also gone through a similar learning process. I’m in the last legs of coursework and proposal writing before going ABD (fingers crossed), and all of my papers tend to bleed when I get them back. I am assured they aren’t actually awful, but what helps me not get really upset about it and move forward (almost) immediately is to remember that everyone editing my work also received edits just like these when they were at the same stage in my career. I know this because I have had some awesome profs/advisors/mentors tell me this several times. Other than that, I can only say I wish I had a writing teacher like you during my undergrad!