Reading, Responding, Composing: A Revisionary Approach

Phillip Arrington

In his essay "Research Strategies for the Study of Revision Processes in Writing Poetry," Gabriel M. Della-Piana offers a five-phase "writing as revision model" to explain and to describe the revision practices of poets.1 Beginning with a mental "preconception or set," that initial expectation of what a text will be, its affect on readers, or some fertile word, phrase, or image, the poet eventually learns to "discriminate" between that preconception and the actual draft he or she is producing. If these two components fail to match, and if the poet sees that they don't, dissonance follows and, if this state continues, it creates "tension," that need to close the gap between intention and text. This tension dissolves, if at all, only through the poet's "reconception" of the intention, the text, or both (106-107).

Della-Piana's model, besides being quite abstract and obviously dependent on the terminology of cognitive psychologists' accounts of perception, is tentative and provisional. Della-Piana does not insist, for example, that these strategies are always or necessarily "conscious" or "that the elements described flow in a fixed sequence." Nor does he believe—and this admission is crucial for teachers of composition, intermediate or advanced—“that one will see dissonance, feel tension, or try to resolve the tension by matching one's intentions with one's perception of what the work does." Moreover, he points out that his model "does not imply that there is only one process or set of processes shared by all writers." Whereas his is "a model of the process of writing-as-revision," it is a model content to outline the "commonalities" among the "diverse" revising schemes of writers and poets (107-108).

Bracketed with qualifications as Della-Piana's revisionist model of writing is, it finds analogous descriptions in the work of Donald Murray and Nancy I. Sommers, among others.2 In fact, in one sense Delia-Piana's model is more complex than, say, Murray's three-fold process of "prevision, vision, and revision" in that Della-Piana is sensitive to the conflicts which writers see and experience over longer stretches of time. While it is true that Sommers and Murray want to explain the revision strategies of experienced or professional writers of prose, not poetry, the similarities in their various theoretical descriptions intimate broader but still provisional discoveries about the revising practices among poets and prose-writers.

But there is another analogy I want to consider here: that of the relationship between writing-as-revision and responding and reading as revision. For some time now, cognitive psychologists and information theorists have been trying to articulate those perceptual and cognitive processes by and through which we interact with the world around us.3 And although there remains more caution and controversy than certainty in what this research means, many experts agree that our mental "schema,' our ways of seeing and knowing the world, depend as much on what we have seen and known as they do on what we expect to perceive and recognize in any given situation. The most salient feature of these schema is, in Ulric Neisser's phrase, “adaptive variation.”4 If in-coming data from the environment fails to match those constructs we already possess for making sense, we quickly modify these constructs according to the exigencies of the moment. Thus, seeing and knowing take place in time and, like our responses, are subject to change—even deformation—as the situation requires.

The temporalizing of human response strategies can easily be seen in phenomenological descriptions of the reading of literary texts. For illustrations, we need only consult the reading act as described by Wolfang Iser, Michael Riffiterre, Johnathan Culler, and Stanley Fish.5 Fish, for example, substitutes the question "What does a text do?" for the earlier, more New Critical question, "What does a text mean?" (386-387). Once we've granted this substitution, reading "involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time" (387-388). For Fish, as for Iser, Riffaterre, and Louise Rosenblatt,6 the meaning of a story or a poem is "an event” in which readers make, un-make, and re-make the meaning of the words within "the temporal flow of the reading experience" (389). So defined, reading, like responding and writing is fundamentally a "revisionary" act. We read within the shadow of our preconceptions—as these are deter- mined by our culture, history, and individual temperament—and project forward from them, into the "not-yet-read." Along the way, we make "themes" of what we've read, of what we've experienced in what we've read, and construct "horizons" of what’s to come, based on those themes. Neither Fish nor Iser, however, would have us think that this revising process in our reading is merely continuous and without problems. Literary texts, for instance, contain "gaps," "blanks," to use Iser's terminology, which on the one hand block a reader's search for easy closure and on the other invite a reader's capacity for inventing the connections between these gaps. And there is no guarantee, of course, that any reader will accept this invitation to participate and therefore to revise his or her preconceptions about what a text is supposed to do.

If these are features of literary texts, and if these texts by definition create occasions for revisionary comprehension, can the same be said of non-literary texts? In short, is any act of reading revisionary, or must the text be Joyce's Ulysses or one of Sir Thomas Browne's essays before we can make use of phenomenological descriptions of this process? Even while admitting the crucial differences between, say, making an interpretation of Joyce's novel as opposed to an interpretation of a newspaper article, we find Frank Smith defining reading comprehension as that "reduction of uncertainty" wherein "the term meaning identification . . . helps to emphasize that comprehension is an active process." For Smith, a psycholinguist, "meaning does not reside in surface structure [that is, the 'visual information' composed of letters, words, phrases, sentences, or even larger units]" but in the "deep" structure of what readers "already know" and "what they want to know."7 Between a reader's memory and prior knowledge and a reader’s desires and anticipations is the text, about which we make "global" and "focal" predictions, with the former continuously being modified by the latter and the latter, the former (Smith 169). At the "global" level readers approach a novel or a chemistry textbook within the matrix of those pre-established conventions which constitute those types of texts. But these conventions, and the expectations which they arouse, are not static; they shift according to the "focal" predictions we make as we read and comprehend each unit of meaning however large or small we make that textual unit. From its title and opening pages, for example, Swift's Gulliver's Travels appears to be a travel-book similar to others of its type written during the eighteenth century. Soon, however, even the least discriminating of readers will start to realize that the conventions of travel literature do not altogether explain Swift’s distortions. And there are "global" expectations which escape the purely generic, for certain readers desire certain types of texts at particular times while others prefer quite different reading. One reader, we can imagine, may slam Swift's book to the floor, as not only a failed travel-book but a ridiculous farce. This reader does not choose to fill the Iserian gap between generic expectation and textual fact, and he or she has stopped reading at the first appearance of dissonance. Another reader, however, thinks, "Ah, this isn't a travel-book at all but some type of wild fantasy," and has therefore revised expectations and continues reading, and revising.

The unifying premise between Smith's psycholinguistic theory of reading, that of the phenomenologists, and the revising model Delia-Piana, among others, proposes—that premise is this: reading, like responding and composing, is an event with a history, a history filled with pauses, hesitations, conflicts, resolutions, and renewed sources of tension. More precisely, these conflicts can, when readers and writers discover them, generate new meanings, ones in which previous ways of making sense are seen again, in a new light. However different the texts—and there is quite adifference between readers who want to reduce the "uncertainty" of a text and those who read texts whose aim is to increase, not reduce, uncertainty—readers do strive for coherence in what they read. A chemistry text, certainly, if the reader already has the "non-visual information," permits more rapid closure than Swift's satire. Yet in either case, readers seek meaning and often, if this search is frustrated too much, resort to quick and easy resolutions.

Admittedly, Smith, Fish, Iser, and Della-Piana represent divergent methods and take for their object of attention different types of texts. But this divergence rests on the common recognition that seeing, reading, and writing are "processes," not "products," taking place in and through time. A full exploration of this antithesis awaits its historian. The more immediate problem for teachers of both reading and writing is how to translate this revisionist approach, predicated as it is on the behavior and habits of mature, experienced, and professional readers and writers, into workable classroom strategies for students, many of whom, even in advanced composition courses, are not and do not aim to become experienced or professional writers.

Intermediate composition courses these days do introduce students to various revision strategies, but these strategies need to be reemphasized in advanced composition courses as well. Perhaps they should constitute the focus of this frequently ill-defined writing course. I have in mind here a sequence of various types of writing, with each based on a single literary text but whose rhetorical constraints vary and become increasingly complex. This sequence is not meant to impose a "linear" grid upon Della-Piana's revisionist model. Rather, each writing assignment repeats many of the tasks of the previous ones, builds upon them, as the final paper emerges out of the revising cycles—cycles in which new questions are posed, new discoveries made, introducing dissonance which writers seek to explore and to resolve, if possible, through added information.

For this is precisely the problem as Della-Piana phrases it: how to approach writing as a way of uncovering the antitheses and conflicts inherent in texts in order that, through rewriting, our students may see again and revise their preconceptions. Although artificial in nature, the advanced composition classroom would try to approximate as far as possible the indefinite time scheme of revising. This can be done, I submit, by shifting and varying the rhetorical constraints for each assignment and by introducing perspectives which require students to find more information to resolve the questions involved. In this way we allow the dissonance to appear within the initial drafts and responses to them, with medial and terminal drafts functioning as ways of rethinking and revising the initial ones. Therefore, writing is always a rewriting, a rethinking of the problem implicit or explicit in the first drafts.

To experiment with the broad implications of Della-Piana's scheme, I recently taught Dorothy Parker’s "But the One on the Right" (1929) as the single text upon which I based a number of different writing assignments, each requiring a new revisionary strategy while reinforcing previous ones. Again, by "revising" I do not mean simply what Donald Murray calls "external revision," although that also occurs; I mean a different way of seeing Parker’s text, with revision as the principal heuristic.

My choice of Parker's interior monologue as a seminal text is far from innocent or arbitrary. Like many composition teachers, I still believe that the dissonance literature produces through its distortions and indirections serves as a valuable point of departure for students. Moreover, I contend that the long history of rhetoric upholds the "literary" basis of writing courses, even if what students are in fact doing is finding out the ways literature is rooted in a writer's life, times, and culture. Even before Plato, the ancient sophists taught their students how to read and to interpret the poets. This discipline enhanced the twin studies of grammar and disputation.8 In fact, within this tradition literature was always a means to an end just as rhetoric was more a quartet of concerns rather than today's popular triad. Thinking and speaking joined reading and writing as the major foci, from Quintilian to Erasmus. Literature was seldom viewed in and for itself, as we sometimes have done. It constituted the culture's transmitted heritage. Themes were approached didactically, and style was even then seen as an index of a writer's mind and the times in which it grew. Yet Quintilian and Erasmus share a common belief that through continuous practice in thinking, reading, and writing, students eventually learn the method of learning itself.

In trying to make sense of the internal gymnastics of one of Parker's most cynically intelligent but needy heroines, my students do not follow the strategies of these earlier rhetorical mentors in any absolute sense. But in another sense they do: they discover themselves through learning about other values, other beliefs, represented in the literature to which they are exposed. In their initial writings, I want merely to see them think through their responses to "Mrs. Parker." In posing a "reader-response" type of assignment, I do not have in mind some ideal reaction to Parker's narrator. Instead, my goal with this paper is for my students to arrive at a question which will introduce dissonance into their initial understanding of the character, their "preconceptions," to use Della-Piana's term. In short, I want students to ask themselves, "What is this Mrs. Parker really like?"

In the beginning, students have only limited responses to Mrs. Parker. They misunderstand her wit as the cynicism of boredom and class arrogance. This result is not totally unexpected, and I set up the short writing tasks in order to invite free and relatively impressionistic reactions to her character. I ask students to read the story and then make a rough list of whatever the character reminded them of. Here they can make use of metaphor as a way of expressing their feelings about Mrs. Parker and as a way of discovering ideas within those feelings.9 The inherent analogical structure of a metaphor allows them to explore the unknown (Mrs. Parker) through the known. One student compared her monologue to the random "slashings" of a psychopath; another, to the hypocritical posturing of Diane on the comedy series, "Cheers."

Once students have written for about five or ten minutes, generating their associations, etc., I ask them to pick one of their metaphors or associations and to write a brief essay, with themselves as intended audience, explaining what the connection means. In another brief writing, they select a comparison or association to explain to another student. In each case, of course, the amount of development the writer gives to the idea varies according to the intended reader. The second essay should be longer than the first, although it may conceivably be based on the same metaphor. Once the second essay is finished, students exchange papers and read each other's responses to Mrs. Parker. At the bottom of the essay, each reader writes a summary of what the writer said and consults with the writer to see if both are in agreement. If they are not, of course, students have probably discovered together a moment in the essay which needs revision: they have found a point of dissonance between what the writer wanted to say and what was written. And this discovery invites both writer and reader to work together to resolve their conflict.

Next, I break the class into small groups of three or four students each and ask them to share and discuss their responses to Mrs. Parker. During these workshops, I wander from one group to the next, listening to students discriminate between one and then another's student's impressions of Mrs. Parker. Usually, I ask them to look for differences in their perspectives on the character and, as I visit each group, I found many deriding this character, viewing her as a cynical, if not "pessimistic," harpy, callous in her thoughts about the "man on the left," the dinner party, and life in general, and cruelly imaginative in expressing this callousness. Yet in nearly every group, I found one student who thought Mrs. Parker witty, amusing, and intelligent, but terribly lonely and overly conscious about being a woman in a "man's world," governed by constraining social conventions.

These divergent interpretations of "What Mrs. Parker is really like" tell much about the different preconceptions of individual readers, their cultural, social, and psychological expectations. Almost all of the male students, for example, condemned the harsh treatment of the dinner companion to Mrs. Parker’s left, while several females judged the character based on her superficial attraction to the man "on the right." Several students also noted her arrogance, which these readers found offensive and unjustified, and her social snobbery. Given the working-class backgrounds of most of the students in my class, this last reaction is not surprising; for in fact my students sensed very quickly a fictional "voice" in contrast to those with which they were already familiar. And they reacted negatively to a darker view of life.

The divergent reactions to Mrs. Parker, however, set the stage for a second reading of the story. In rereading Mrs. Parker’s monologue, students copied down any word, phrase, image, or passage which (a) shows the character's cynicism, snobbery, and cruelty or (b) shows her loneliness, honesty with herself, and the pressure of sexual and social restraints. With the direct evidence from the story for both responses to Mrs. Parker, the class sorts through it, evaluating and discussing the weight of each quotation or incident. By the end of this process, I ask the students to write another essay about their reactions to Mrs. Parker—this time aimed at their classmates as readers and this time drawing upon the best supporting evidence from the story to illustrate their interpretation of her character.

These papers are exchanged and evaluated as before, but with an additional task of checking to make sure the direct evidence from the story relates to the overall response to Mrs. Parker's character. By now I have reached a second point of inquiry. What can students find out about this character beyond their own preconceptions about her and the support the story gives to them? My students supplied a quick response to that question. They could find out something about Dorothy Parker's life, her personality, and her other writings. In fact, many students were already aroused about this connection by the shared last name of both author and character. To satisfy this need for more information about Parker the writer, students found and read Thomas Grant's biographical sketch in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (hereafter, the DLB).

This need for more information on Parker the author, I might add, emerges out the several different ways of viewing her creation, Mrs. Parker. An appeal to the direct evidence in the text to support a response does not, therefore, put an end to the antithetical views of Mrs. Parker. And the antithesis itself signifies another level of dissonance which the text cannot resolve. Hence the obvious curiosity about the author's relation to her characters. There, students may think, would lie the key to answering once and for all the enigma of Mrs. Parker.

This confidence in the value of biographical information, however naive and misplaced, introduces a fourth writing assignment: a report summarizing the basic facts about Dorothy Parker’s life, personality, and her other writings. But this report must in the end be synthesized with the facts of the story itself. Even with this added information, dissonance remains for the writer; and we may frame this conflict in the form of another question: To what extent does Mrs. Parker the character resemble Dorothy Parker the author?

"To what extent" cues students to make careful comparisons between their reports and the story. Some connections will be quite obvious. For example, most of the students discovered that Mrs. Parker's barbed one-liners matched those made by Dorothy Parker in real life. But other connections required sophisticated inferential abilities. The educational background of the character, her classical allusions, French phrases, and knowledge of literature—this background had been laid during the time the author spent in Miss Dana's school, with its rigorous curriculum. And Mrs. Parker's attitude toward men, sex, and the social rules governing both—these facts, too, require students to look more closely at the subtler shades of resemblance between character and author. Hence, although the bio-graphical information about Parker resolves and explains some facets of Mrs. Parker's inner speech, it raises other difficulties which the writers need to solve.

Finding those connections between story and creator is the objective of the next draft, but this process can be aided if students first try to imagine a potential reader for this draft. Unlike previous writings, this draft cannot be aimed at other class members because they all share the same information and the same task. At this point, however, students and instructor can work together to invent an audience for the paper.10 Students quickly suggest "any reader of the story," but this suggestion will need more qualification. Students need to explain a condition of interest for such a reader. Here, too, a satisfactory solution was soon found. The reader for the drafts would be familiar with Parker's story and curious about the fact that both author and fictional persona share the same last name. Beyond that, however, this fictive reader would know nothing of Parker's life or her other writings. What does such a reader need to know, then? Precisely those connections which exist between the story's persona and the author. This "need to know" also shapes the purpose of the discourse: to inform. And with a purpose and a reader matching their information, students compose their drafts.

In reading and evaluating these papers, I play the role dictated by the reader profile and purpose statement. Yet as I read through these papers, I noted numerous students who remarked that Dorothy Parker was a unique woman, being the first and only member of her sex to enjoy the fraternity of the rather exclusively male-dominated Algonquin Round Table. Such generalizations as these provide the starting point for the next draft. After pointing out this generality to my classes, I posed another question: What was the status of women in America during the late twenties and early thirties? To answer it, students would need to do a bit of reading in the history of that period and write a report, as they had done following the reading of Grant's bio-sketch, explaining what they were able to find out about this subject.

This report, like the first one, is the informational hinge linking it to a larger paper and a more complex synthesis of information. Students take the historical information and combine it with the biographical material, after which they bring both to bear on the character of Mrs. Parker in the story. Just as students had to find ways to connect fiction to biography, so now they need to discover connections between history, biography, and fiction. By introducing the historical background in which Dorothy Parker lived and wrote into the writing process, I wanted them to rethink their discoveries made in the previous draft. Students could use the same reader and purpose, of course, but now a new kind of "dissonance" had to be recognized and resolved, making necessary an even larger synthesis than before.

Students conclude this cycle of writings on Parker's story by returning to that text and, using the knowledge and discoveries made in their previous drafts, developing a comprehensive interpretation of Mrs. Parker. Here students make an argument rather than simply report or respond. And they also create another reader profile for this draft, a profile of a reader who knows what they know but needs to be convinced of the connections between Parker's character, Parker herself, and the historical circumstances surrounding both author and creation. This final paper passes through at least one revision workshop, in which the goal is for students to evaluate whether the writer achieves his or her purpose for the proposed reader, and one more editing workshop, in which polishing and refining the paper's mechanics are the objectives, before the instructor evaluates the finished product.

To summarize, then: I have tried to articulate what I see as a basic, unifying principle between Delia-Piana's "writing-as- revision" model, and those other models it encompasses and resembles, and those general descriptions of perception and cognition formulated by cognitive psychologists, descriptions which current reading theorists assume or extend into their own analyses of what it means to "read" a text, literary or non- literary. That principle is that reading, like writing and responding to the world around us, is revisionary, a process admitting change, conflict, confusion, and resolution into its fluid but still identifiable boundaries. Moreover, I have tried to suggest how we might make revision the basis of advanced composition courses by teaching our students that revising, in its larger, more creative sense, is a different way of seeing and knowing any experience or object, a way of turning a text, say, in order to examine it from various angles: that of an individual reader’s perspective, or of a group of readers, or from the perspective of the author's life and times.

Obviously, this notion of revision is more "global" than "focal," to use Smith's term. Yet I have tried to show how those more "focal" problems requiring revision, at the level of word, sentence, or paragraph, can be addressed within the broader constraints of purpose, audience, and research. In shifting these different rhetorical constraints, I have found that my students keep from getting bored with such extended examination of and writing on a single text—which is always a danger to be devoutly avoided in the type of pedagogical translation I have made. Such an approach does not, of course, solve all of the many problems our students have, whether in advanced or intermediate composition courses. Some students simply revise more effectively than others; they are capable of withstanding dissonance and ambiguity over longer periods than their peers. And I would add that one of the most prevalent "blocks" to revising—at least in the students I have taught using this approach—is students' narrow view of what revising in fact entails, a view probably derived from past experiences with other composition teachers for whom revising is no different from editing or proof-reading. Certainly more research needs to be done on students' "preconceptions" about writing, and my own approach needs to be studied and experimented with on an extended basis. No doubt any model for the revision process will find itself caught up in the very process it seeks to describe. This result need not surprise or dismay writing teachers in search of quick and easy explanations of a very complex phenomena. Rather, it reveals how much revising is part of the thinking process itself, a process whereby we see and resee what we think through the embodying capacity of language itself.

Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, Michigan

Notes

1Della-Piana's article is in Research on Composing: Points of Departure, eds. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1978). His revisionist model of composing appears on p. 107. Further references to Della-Piana's essay appear in the text.

2 See Murray's "Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery," in Research On Composing, cited above, pp. 85-103 and Sommer's "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers," CCC, 31 (1981), 378-387. Recent studies of revision extend and refine Murray's and Sommer's observations. See Carol Berkenkotter, "Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer," CCC, 34 (1983), 156-169, and Donald Murray's response in that same issue, "Response of a Laboratory Rat—or, Being Protocoled," 169-172; Mimi Schwartz, “Revision Profiles: Patterns and Implications," CE, 45 (1983), 549-558; see especially Roland K. Huff, "Teaching Revision: A Model of the Drafting Process,” CE, 45 (1983), 800-816.

3 The work in cognitive psychology and information theory is extensive, but the works I have found most useful are as follows: Ulric Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967; Karl H. Pibram, Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradoxes and Principles in Neuropsychology (Englewood, Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); D. E. Berlyne, Structure and Direction in Thinking (New York: John Wiley, 1965), especially pages 256-260; James Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1966); E. H Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969); John S. Antrobus, ed., Cognition and Affect (Boston: Little-Brown, 1970); and Michael I. Posner, Cognition: An Introduction (Glenview, Ill.: Scott-Foresman, 1973).

4 Neisser, p. 262.

5 See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978); Michael Rifffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978); Johnathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981); Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972). Further references to Fish will appear in the text.

6 Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader The Text The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1978).

7 Frank Smith, Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read, 2nd ed. (1971; rpt. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1978), pp. 157-158. Further references will appear in the text.

8 See W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), p. 45.

9 Numerous writing theorists identify metaphor or one of its close cousins, analogy, simile, or similitude, as an invention strategy. See D. Gordon Rohman, "Pre-writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process,” CCC, 16 (1965), 112-114; Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 48-75; Linda S. Flower and John R. Hayes, "Problem-Solving Strategies and the Composing Process," CE, 39 (1979), 455; and James Moffett, Coming On Center: English Education in Evolution (Montclair, N. J.: Boynton/Cook, 1981), p. 147.

10 On this approach, see Lisa S. Ede, "On Audience and Composition," CCC, 30 (1979), 291-295. Ede outlines two ways of dealing with audience: instructor imposition or student invention, the last of which she favors because it permits students to become actively involved in considering purpose and context and mode of publication (294).