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.