JAC Volume 1, Issue 2

Typically, advanced composition sections contain somewhat fewer, as well as somewhat better, students than do freshman composition classes. As a result, the advanced sections potentially allow for more individual conferences and peer evaluation, and for increased attention to style, tone and rewriting. In trying to take best advantage of this potential, I became interested in the latter—the role that rewriting should play in advanced composition, using this term to mean the revising of papers after they have been evaluated in some manner. I was concerned with such questions as: To what extent should students be asked to rewrite? Is it more valuable for them to redo better papers or poorer ones? Which aspects of a paper merit most attention in rewriting? Do students respond more to the reactions their writing produces in their instructors or in their fellow students? And so on. ¹

In order to reach some conclusions about advanced composition, I thought it would be useful to consider these same questions in freshman composition. Actually, I was in a position to compare three levels of composition. I received the cooperation of the staff at my former school, the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, in studying rewriting in freshman composition. And I taught two variations of post-freshman composition, one (which I will call C 201) for any students having completed freshman composition, the other (here numbered C 301) for those making an "A" or a "B" in their previous composition courses. For the last two years, during which time I taught a total of nine sections of C 201 and C 301, involving some 150 students, I kept notes on students rewriting. I focused on the central question: given peer and instructor response to their papers, and a choice as to what and how to rewrite, what will students decide to change, and how effective will these changes be? I found clear differences between the levels: it appears that writers at the three levels of composition courses react differently to the task of revising. The differences form a pattern which, while not surprising, seems to me to have pedagogical implications for the effective teaching of advanced composition.

My study has been informal and impressionistic—writing improvement, for examples was measured entirely by my own subjective judgement yet my impressions are not, I believe, without value. If the conclusions I reached are necessarily limited and tentative, at the least they invite comparison with the experience of other instructors, and further testing.

Freshman Composition

For freshman composition I distributed two questionnaires, one to the staff, and later, with my colleagues' help, one to students in freshman writing courses. Fifteen teachers, covering nearly all the freshman composition sections during one term, and ranging from TA's to veteran instructors cooperated. The first questionnaire asked the staff members how they had used rewriting in their sections, and what results they had. Although two instructors required every paper to be rewritten, four others never made a rewriting assignment. Of those instructors who did require rewriting, nearly all indicated that rewritten papers were sometimes better, but frequently merely different. When improvement did occur, it seemed to result primarily from individual conferences with students (little peer evaluation was employed), and better students benefited more from rewriting  than did weaker students. (Of course there may be something of a circular argument there.) One instructor summed up the majority reaction: "I have mixed emotions about assigning rewrites in 101. The best students usually don’t derive  any profit from them. The worst students see them as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, which defeats the whole purpose of assigning them."

When the freshman were asked their views on rewriting (their questionnaires were filled out anonymously, in an attempt to reduce the inevitable factor of tolling the teachers what they are thought to want to hear) some clear patterns emerged from the 386 responses. Perhaps out of naive optimism, the students seemed to value rewriting more than did their instructors. One question posed was whether students thought rewriting was a good idea for most papers, weak papers, better papers, or a waste of time. They were also asked whether their composition grades were below average, average, or above. There was a definite correlation between having weaker grades and thinking weaker papers should be the ones rewritten, and between claiming above average grades and believing in the value of rewriting better papers. However, all of those few students who indicated that class discussion of their work had influenced their rewriting thought weaker or average papers, not better papers, should be the ones redone. As the responses came from students in both the first and second terms of composition, another pattern emerged: a higher percentage of 102 than 101 students thought better papers benefited the most revision.

One could speculate that the weaker writers were more likely to think that rewriting primarily involved correcting surface errors, and, as weaker papers had more of these errors, such papers benefited the most from being redone. Better students perhaps wanted the chance to renew the mixed pleasure of engaging themselves with a paper whose first version had been, perhaps because of the topic, somewhat successful and thereby more gratifying to write.

If one assumes that moving from 101 to 102 is a motion in the direction of advanced composition, and that a student with better grades in freshman composition is more like a student of advanced composition than is her less proficient classmate, then one might expect students in advanced composition to prefer rewriting their better efforts. This is, indeed, just what I found in my advanced writing courses.

Advanced Composition

In both my C 201 and C 301 courses, after the students wrote some half-dozen papers I asked them to select one of these papers for a thorough rewriting, and to include a report of what they changed and why. ² With something approaching unanimity (the only significant exceptions being those few cases when the assignment had been misunderstood), the students in the more advanced course, C 301, selected one of their better papers to rework. In the less advanced course.,C 201, a majority rewrote better work, but here as in freshman composition, the weaker students were more inclined to take another shot at a relatively poor paper.

Of course, it does not necessarily follow that students should be encouraged to do what they prefer—I know some colleagues who might argue the obverse. Yet there are advantages to having students select for themselves, rather than being told by their instructor, what work to emphasize. They proceed less grudgingly, and the finished results, I found, have an improved quality that reflects the better motivation.

I was interested, though, not only in which papers were rewritten, but also in what aspects of the papers received more attention in the process. To make it easy on myself, ignoring the complex interrelations of form and content, I divided the possible aspects into content, organization, diction, and sentence structure. It seemed that most students in both courses, C 201 and C 301, were able to change, and add, content with relative facility. Differences here emerged only in that the better students added new content that was nearly always an improvement, while weaker students, like freshman writers, sometimes, for example, substituted  examples that were no more relevant or convincing than those originally employed.

In organization, the C 301 students were appreciably more able to conceive and executed new patterns than were C201 writers. The majority of the latter required help, through conferences, before they were able to reorganize their material effectively.

Changes in diction were made more frequently by the C 201 students, but wording changes made by the more advanced writers in C 301, while less frequent, were more often, in my judgement, clear improvements.

Changes in sentence structure were perhaps the most interesting. Nancy Sommers, comparing the revision  of experienced writers to that of students, points out that the former place a much heavier emphasis upon rewriting on the sentence level. ³ I found this observation supported, indirectly, by seeing a connection between the level of students and the amount of changes made in sentence structure. (I am speaking not of correcting syntactical errors, but of substituting new “correct” patterns for previous, also correct, but less effective, ones). Most of my C201 students resembled the majority of freshman students in finding it difficult to do more,  in sentence revision, than occasionally combine shorter sentences through coordination. The C 301 students, by contrast, while they had more difficulty with revision of sentence structure than with other aspects of rewriting, on occasion were able to revise by using subordination, in version, and parallelism to good effect, and could “uncombine” ungainly sentences. Indeed, it was in sentence structure that the most significant, if less facile, improvements were made in the revisions carried out by my C 301 students.

The revisions that my students decided to do were not, of course, a result only of their own re-seeing of their papers. The students were influenced by my comments, both those written on their papers and made in conference, and by comments from their classmates. These comments were important in both my advanced courses; unlike most freshman sections, C 201 and C 301 were run on a quasi – “workshop” basis. Student papers were frequently reproduced and distributed to the class for response and evaluation. While my response to any individual paper ordinarily was not that different from the collective judgment of the class, the reaction of the writer of the paper, as reflected in subsequent rewriting, usually did show a significant differentiation between my views and the opinions of her classmates. Generally, my opinion was respected when I criticized content and organization; when fellow students found weakness in these areas, the writer would resist change, believing that she knew the subject better than did her peers. However, when I found fault with the diction and sentence structure, while the students were polite and did not ignore my remarks, they displayed a certain tendency to think I was being “picky” or using typical English instructor’s Socratic play of pretending not to understand – I got the “you know what I mean” response. By contrast, when his peers found that word choice or sentence structure interfered with understanding, or weakened impact, the author was bothered and took this criticism seriously in doing a rewrite. Criticism was not, certainly, all negative, but the same pattern was present regarding responses to favorable comments; encouragement, resulting in no change or in increased emphasis in rewriting, was valued more in regard to content if it came from me, in style if it came from fellow students. ⁴

Conclusions

Observing, then, three levels of student work, that done in freshman composition, composition C 201, and composition C 301, I was able to think of a continuum of relatively inexperienced to relatively advanced students and reach four pedagogical conclusions regarding rewriting. First, the more advanced the students, the more valuable rewriting may be. Second the more advanced the students, the more appropriate it is to have them rework their better papers. (It follows from this that teachers of advanced composition should sharpen a skill seldom called on in teaching freshman composition, the ability to suggest significant improvements that may be made in a paper already deserving, by most standards a “A”. If we are teaching truly advanced composition we may have to teach the difference between “A” and “A+” work.) Third, to encourage students to do that which they find somewhat difficult yet rewarding, the more advanced the students the more revision of sentence structure should be emphasized. Finally, following from this, the more advanced the students, the more important is peer evaluation.

These are not earth-shaking, nor other than tentative, conclusions; many instructors of advanced composition may already have reached them. However, I hope they at least suggest the value of seeing advanced composition in a comparative perspective, and of relating our teaching to our student’s feelings  about the work they are asked to do.