Response to Revision Strategies

After reading Nancy Sommers’ research monograph, I noticed how I have developed as a writer. In middle school and at the beginning of high school, I was what Sommers called a “student writer”. My version of revising was to replace words I used often with something else I found in a thesaurus and editing for typos and grammar mistakes. But after I started writing analytically, I looked more at my sentence structures and sometimes even at my arguments. My papers started becoming better and my ideas developed more.

There are some parts of the reading I don’t completely agree with. Sommers argues that student writers often find that there is “something larger” wrong with their papers but do not seek to correct it because they do not have a means to. This is true but when I was a student writer, I didn’t seek to develop ideas more not only because I did not know how to but also because I was lazy. Furthermore, as a student, after I am done writing an essay, I tend to print it without proof reading it. The thought of “I’m finally done and I never want to see it again” takes over and I just turn in the assignment. (But that was when I was still in high school. I’m a little better now.)

Lastly, I especially like the comment by the writer who said “I feel like Con Edison cutting off certain states to keep the generators going. In first and second drafts, I try to cut off as much as I can of my editing generator, and in a third draft, I try to cut off some of my idea generators, so I can make sure that I will actually finish the essay.” If writers keep adding new ideas to their papers, they may deviate from original prompt and end up writing about something completely different from what they wanted to. For example, a paper that was supposed to be about why the sky is blue may turn into a paper about how the sky looks pretty. Luckily, this hasn’t happened to me yet because I reread the prompt almost every time I add something to my essays.

After reading this article, I think that I can be considered a semi-experienced writer. :)