This reading is a research conducted by Nancy Sommers who wrote about the various aspects of the writing process, and how student writers differ from experienced adult writers and their different revising techniques or strategies. Nancy Sommers focused more than anything on revision and its stages since current models of the writing process have directed attention away from revision and it has been notably absent as she referred to it. In these writing conceptions of the writing process, revision is commonly viewed as a separate stage left for the end, or it’s seen as something you do once you are done with your writing, and this is what student writers tend to do, or they don’t take revision as such big deal or even consider it a part of the writing process. There is crucial stages or parts to the writing process which must be properly followed in order to have a positive outcome in your writing, the parts of classical rhetoric are being described in the reading as “stages” of composition that are repeated in the contemporary models of the writing process. She gives an example of the writer Edward Corbett’s idea of the “five parts of a discourse- disposition, elocution, memoria, pronunciation and, disregarding the last two parts since after rhetoric came to be concerned mainly with reading discourse.” Many other authors also follow these stages, not because of the historical accident, but because the process represented in the linear model is based on the irreversibility of speech. The writer Roland Barthes referred to it as “irreversible” he then explains how a word cannot be retracted from what you wrote, “Except precisely by saying that one retracts on it, to cross out here is to add.”379. Following by an example that if a writer wants to erase what they’ve just said; one simply cannot do it without showing the eraser itself. Meaning that you must express your mistake or what you didn’t mean to say on the reading, a good example of doing so could be “or rather, I expressed myself badly.” Most students don’t use the terms revising or rewriting in their vocabulary or feel comfortable using them for that matter, students responded that it was not a word that they used, but a word their teachers used. Although most of the students developed various functional terms to describe the type of changes made which included; “Scratch and do over again, Reviewin, Redoing, Marking out, Slashing and throwing out”381 The students understand the revision process as a rewording activity, meaning that they might indeed change the text but they change the wording rather than the writing itself. We can see in contrast how experienced writers in the other hand, focus on a primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument, “Experienced writers often use structural expressions such as finding a framework, pattern or design.” 384 Experienced writers responded that since their first drafts are usually scattered attempts to define their territory, their objective on their second drafts is to begin observing general patterns of development and decide what to include or take off the text.
AuthorMy name is Alex Ivan Martinez, I'm a freshman at UTEP seeking an Engineering Leadership major and a graphic design minor.
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