Walvoord on Coaching Process: Draft Revision

 

A third area of Walvoord’s process coaching is revision. The problem Walvoord articulates is that students tend to write doggedly. They tend to slog through a paper the night before it is due. They do not then tend to revise in any meaningful spirit of revision; they hunt for and fix errors. Her response to this is to increase pressure to produce a draft, but to decrease pressure regarding the perfection of that draft. The following points are my favorites:

“Helping Students With Drafting and Revising” pp. 85-88

“Structure a draft deadline.” It is interesting to me that Walvoord considers giving credit for the draft as being more important than actually reading, much less commenting, on it.

            “Explain the zero draft.” Walvoord pulls from Lynn Z. Bloom’s ideas here, adopting the perspective that a draft should more resemble a freewrite than a polished paper. Structure, then, goes out the window (as do grammar/punctuation &c.); the primary stricture is that the student stay on topic. Ideas should be expansive, explained, fleshed out. Students can then produce a single sentence expressing the most promising aspect of their paper drafts, and organize, cut, and add material until a coherent outline emerges.

Students need to learn “task definition,” which means that they need to learn to identify different tasks of revision and focus on one at a time, or at least resist incorporating narrowly-focused tasks too early in the revision process. As I understand it, something like defining and expanding key terms and notions would be a task for early revisions. Transitions between paragraphs and refining an argument’s flow would need to come subsequently. Polishing individual sentences is a crucial task as well, but doesn’t make sense until a bit later in the revision process. Walvoord argues rather extensively against first-draft polishing. Much as I don’t want to interact with sloppy student work at any time in the process, I can see how early polish might actually act as a barrier to revision. If a student has already created something she wants to call “good” or “finished,” even if that just means the commas are all in place, then revising might frustrate her writing process rather than enhance it.

“Reward revision.” Here, Walvoord articulates advice I encounter on an ongoing basis, and that I find eye-opening and invaluable. She stresses that comments on early drafts receive attention and grades on final drafts receive attention. Comments on final drafts, however, are overshadowed by the grade, and often seem like “treatment prescribed for a patient already dead” (87). Walvoord suggests allowing final drafts to be revised. She uses a two-week window rule: if a student wants a higher grade, they have two weeks to hand in a revision. If I were to offer this option, I think I would require another conference—I’m thinking that it doesn’t make sense to comment too extensively on all the final drafts, but I’d like for a student who is revising to formulate an approved and worthwhile plan and to have a clear direction at the outset. I like the idea of combining requirement and agency, here. I like the idea of building in the necessity of revision to an assignment (I already to this, or at least I attempt to, in all my major assignments), but I also like the idea that ultimately the paper belongs to its author and that its author is responsble for making the decision of when it is finished. This final degree of agency appeals to me.

Walvoord on Coaching the Writing Process: Reasoning and Organization

This post piggybacks on the previous one. Here, I’m isolating some of Walvoord’s thoughts on connecting classtime to paperwriting past the thesis. To sum up Walvoord’s intents in my own words: the important idea is that an argument is a thing that unfolds; the important practice is thus to engage ongoingly in the act of unfolding.

From “Helping Students With Reasoning, Evidence, and Organization” pp. 79-80

1. “Present lecture information as though it were a paper.” In other words, identify paper topics when they arise in class discussion. Note them on the board. Note potential ways of then developing said paper topics as discussion develops. Walvoord supplies an additional point here: at the end of class, remind them that the process they’ve just undergone is something they can and should repeat independently; in other words, remind students that the progression of that day’s class corresponds directly to the path they need to follow in completing paper assignments.

2. “Have students write plans.” That is, have students make a list of possible paper topics. Have students make a list of possible points / outline their arguments.

3. “Scramble a reading.” Here, Walvoord advocates cutting up the paragraphs of a well-organized article/essay and handing them out for the students to arrange. I can also see this happening on the sentence level within a single paragraph in order to stress mindfulness regarding the order in which information appears along the arc of the argument.

I am omitting numbers 4-6 and leaping to...

7. “Discuss the development of a main idea.” Walvoord here suggests having students write their main idea or question, to explain it to a peer and to have that peer then list the evidence/arguments/problems they would expect to see addressed.

Something I notice is that connecting classtime to paperwriting is one part practice and one part commentary. Practicing is what occurs during classtime and ought to take different shapes. Commentary is the explicit path an instructor points to so that students perceive paperwriting as a logical extension, and not satellite, of classtime.

Walvoord and Writing Behavior: the Early Stages

 

Walvoord, Barbara E. Fassler. “Planning to Coach the Writing Process.” Helping Students Write

Well. Second Edition. New York: MLA. 1986.

            Walvoord’s writing-as-process thesis is that the instruction of writing is in some significant part instruction in behavior, or, to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term for essentially the same position, instruction in demeanor. In Walvoord’s own words, “if you are to help students write better, you must teach them how to behave when they are trying to produce an effective piece of writing” (29). I find this position compelling in part because my students do tend toward binge-writing, but more importantly, Walvoord’s words resonate with me because they imply something at stake that is larger than paper-writing / college assignments. Casting effective writing as a matter of behavior draws ethics and the universalizable into the project of composition instruction. My instint is that if comp is to be useful to students in all courses of study, then it probably has to zoom out from English, humanities departments, and even college, to respect and celebrate and cohere within the human project of existing. I do think that a good class in anything taps into this dimension, and addresses (even if only tacitly) “the timeless questions” such as how on earth a person ought to hold herself in relation to her world. But my own struggle as an instructor is in building curricula, syllabi, assignments, and activites—practical, concrete manifestations of this attitude—that not only correspond to such a perspective but that cumulatively build it. How can an instructor coach behavior through the lens of composition? Walvoord has ideas. In this posting I will study them. My task here is thus to inventory and examine Walvoord’s practical approaches to instruction in writerly behavior, though my scope here is limited to Walvoord’s suggestions that pertain specifically to the earliest stages of drafting.

Pacing—specifically, slowing the writerly pace—is central to Walvoord’s approach. Helping students pace their work may (but does not have to) require much instructor participation. Walvoord advocates having students bring in a thesis statement or an introduction even if the instructor never looks at them—have students pair up and explain their thesis to a buddy; anyone without a thesis will at least have to explain to someone why they don’t have a thesis yet, and might get feedback or an idea about how to go about crafting one. Walvoord does not advocate the “loosest” level of seriousness in pacing; that is, she points out that offers to look over a draft during office hours are offers rarely taken up and rarer still by students who need the attention most. “A tighter weir will bring more fish to your net” (36), she writes.

One resource Walvoord offers is a two-column list, “Developing a Topic Through Reading” (56-58). These pair questions to ask of a text with associated paper topics. Likely it is worth typing up in its entirety, handing out (properly cited), and devoting classtime to modeling and developing an intentional practice that incoporates text, reader response, questions, and resulting paper topics. Group work could come of this pretty naturally. I envision practicing the basic progression: having students ask a question of the text, identify a tension or grey zone, and taking a stance on it. In writing, this then requires that an aspect of the text be summarized or inventoried, that a problem therein be explained or a question raised, and that that the question then be answered or the problem commented upon.

Generating a thesis is not, for Walvoord, a part of the writing process that ought to be completed and then checked off the list. She points out that a thesis often starts as a list of random thoughts generated by reading, pondering, talking, freewriting (&c.) and goes on to argue that students need to “list ideas more fully and stay longer at the listing stage” (66). Her idea is that the greater the wealth of possible focuses, the better off a student will be in selecting one as a foundation for a strong thesis. It seems to me that the implications here involve the potential for self-critique: if a student has practiced criticizing student writing, identifying strengths in student writing, as well as identifying weaknesses (and mine have/are), then these critical skills can transfer to their own work—but the skills translate more meaningfully if students have more material to work with in the early, early stages of writing, because only through working with multiple options can students practice discerning comparative strengths and weaknesses within their own efforts at thinking through a problem/argument.