As students in a composition class, we know the tedious struggle of producing quality writing. I’m curious about your thoughts on the conclusion of From Pencils to Pixels, where Baron reveals that “Teachers preferred pencils without erasers, arguing that students would do better, more premeditated work if they didn’t have the option of revising” (31).
Most of us have been in the position of writing something the night or hours before it’s due and ending up with a decent, sometimes great final product. Experiences like this seem to oppose the current method of producing multiple drafts of a piece. Should this procedure be left as a personal preference rather than a requirement?
In Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, which concerns itself with talent and success, he proposes the 10,000 hours theory–essentially to become an expert at something, a person needs to practice the skills of this field for 10,000 hours. He adds though, that the practice needs to be “deliberate practice”–working on the skills where you are weakest, not simply repeating the skills you’ve mastered.
Could the allowance of drafting and revisions weaken the teaching and learning of writing by forcing students to go through a process that might not be contributing to the refinement of their style?
I think this is a really interesting question, and one that I’ve definitely thought about myself. I actually have had teachers give me pencils without erasers for assignments, though only in art classes. To some extent, I understand the concept of careful planning and thoughtful work that having no erasers evokes, but I really feel like in writing, it depends totally on the student. I write drafts only for certain papers, for others I write one draft only, edit it for surface errors, and turn it in. Even though the process of making multiple drafts is often championed by teachers, I hate looking back over my work, especially if I feel I’ve said all I need to. On things that are more creative, like poetry, I tend to have few drafts, but only ever with one of two slight changes in organization or word choice. If I feel the need to make larger edits, I typically just start a new but similar poem.
The point of this is that really, I don’t know if editing is harmful to one’s personal writing process. Most of my teachers have allowed drafts or even requested them, and I still have almost always turned in my first draft, with maybe a little fine tuning. I feel like it depends on the student. For some, I think that editing is a way of fleshing out what you really want to say, making it more emphasized or better supported, but for others, the editing process is overexposure to their own work, causing them to be blind to any changes they might need to make. I certainly don’t think editing is harmful in any way, but I’m not really sure how important it is.
I am definitely one of those students that has been placed in a position of writing a paper the night before (or sometimes same day) it is due and have done well on them. I actually used to think that I wrote better under pressure and sometimes I still wonder if maybe this is the best way of writing. However, I’ve realized that aside from possible grammar, spelling, and other writing conventions errors, these drafts are generally not that well written. I also hate reading my own work over again for some reason even I don’t know but by rereading, I realize that my papers often have loose ends that could be explained further or extraneous information that completely detracts from the focus of the paper. Without revisions, these “mistakes” would weaken my argument and the overall effectiveness of my paper. I believe that the procedure should be left as a personal preference, but it should be required at first so that students are forced to use it to see if their writing improves or not. If students feel as if their writing is the same or not significantly different after drafting and editing, then they shouldn’t be required to keep using it. If, however, students find it beneficial, then it would greatly enhance their papers and make them better writers. I also feel like there are certain instants when it might be better to use ones initial draft as a final product, but I would be hesitant to say those should be used in academia. The only example I can currently think of would be writing creative poems or songs. Case in point, if the song “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was revised and rerecorded to say what it was originally meant to (which by the way was In the Garden of Eden), we wouldn’t have this really awesome psychedelic song which typifies the band Iron Butterfly so well.