Blog #6 - Murray & Sommers

Teach the Motivating Force of Revision by Donald M. Murray and Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers by Nancy Sommers

I got to read two very interesting essays this week. Not that the others we’ve read weren’t, they were, but revision is a topic that I have not read much about before so I found them very interesting. I also found it very interesting because I had to take an online quiz for a different class that was supposed to tell me what part of my writing process I was. And it turned out that I am revision in my writing process – how weird is that?

In his essay, Teach the Motivating Force of Revision, Murray brought out ideas that I had not thought about in the way that he presented them. He talked about revision as a way to discover what one wants to say. I don’t know how many times I’ve revised a paper, but after reading that in this stage you are discovering what you want to say, I felt like I could totally agree with that. Because when I revise, I feel like that’s what I’m trying to do. I am trying to discover what I am trying to say. When I revise, I find myself moving things around and changing the content in the piece of writing that I am working on. Like he says, I am discovering what it is really that I want to say.

In his essay he also said “writers often know more clearly what they don’t want to say than what they do.” I found this so true; I often know what I don’t want to sound like. When I’m creating characters, I also often know what I don’t want my characters to sound like. Then, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it is that I do want to say or what I do want my characters to say.

Murray also said that a lot of writing teachers have not composed pieces of writing themselves. I was very surprised about this. He mentioned that it is hard to imagine a music teacher who has never made music, or an art teacher who has never drawn a picture but unfortunately it is normal to find that writing teachers have only written a few academic papers. I was surprised about this because I just always heard my professors make comments about how they were writing this and they were writing that. They shared their writing process or just spoke about writing as if it was something they normally did. Recently, I even had a professor say that she had written a CNF piece herself because she felt it would be unfair for her to ask us to write CNF without her having done a piece of CNF writing herself.

Towards the end of his essay, Murray mentioned that the writing teacher who writes may be able to enter into the process of individual exploration with each student. I could agree with what Murray says here because it makes me wonder how can a teacher help a student discover or explore if they have not discover and explore themselves? It makes me wonder if they don’t have experience on what they are trying to teach, how can they teach it?

I just really enjoyed the way Murray wrote his essay and what he said. It was easy to read and it was able to relate to it. The ideas he brought forward were interesting and the whole topic about revision was exciting for me to read about.

Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers by Nancy Sommers is an essay that also talked about revision. She started her essay by saying how there has been a lack of attention in research regarding the revision process. I am not surprised about that since I have not really read much about this topic.

Sommers talked about models for the writing process. I found these models interesting because she mentioned that they were linear processes. I felt that this was new information for me. I have always been taught that the writing process was not linear so when Sommers’ essay mentioned the writing process as a linear model, I was surprised. I understand that when you are writing you have sort of like a linear process where you may start by writing/drafting then you’ll move into revision, then you’ll edit and so on. But while one is in any of these stages one tends to move within these stages in a nonlinear way.

As I continued to read her essay, she mentioned she was dissatisfied with both the linear model of writing and the lack of attention to the process of revision. She mentioned that she conducted a series of studies over the past three years which examined the revision process of student writers and experienced writers to see what role revision played in their writing process. She mentioned that the student writers understood revision as a “scratch out and do over again, reviewing, redoing, marking out, and slashing and throwing out.” The student writers understood the process as a rewording activity. Whereas the experienced writers understood revision as a “rewriting and revising process.” The experienced writers described their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument. By the information Sommers provided here, it seems like the experienced writers have a greater understanding about the revision process. I can understand these results being that the students writers are still learning about writing as a whole and the experienced writers have already dealt with all the process and are more familiar with everything involving writing.

Sommers also talked about the revision process being a place for discovery like Murray mentioned. She also said that while writers may focus on a particular stage of the writing process at a time, they may also focus on other areas at the same time. Making this a nonlinear writing process which is what I believe we all experience when we write. I find it nearly impossible to focus on solely one area at a time.