Deep Revision: Meredith Sue Willis

In Deep Revision, Meredith Sue Willis shows that revision can be fun and interesting for students. I've always found it a challenge to help students revise rather than "rewrite". I would use many of her suggestions to help students look at revision in a different way.

In the introduction, Willis claims that it is useless to place a final grade with comments on a paper unless comments are used for revision. One teacher quoted in the book allows all of her students to do "redos" where they can rewrite an essay as often as they like for a better grade. This helps students learn from the comments written on their papers.

She stressed the value of collaboration with revision, in addition to peer response groups. One way to learn to revise is by revising other people's writing. For example, she suggests that students exchange old papers and revise each other's papers. She also suggests that students can revise the teacher's writing, or write an ending to something the teacher had written before. Another suggestion involves writing a collaborative paragraph on the blackboard in class, perhaps a portrait of a person or place. Students would then individually revise the paragraph and discuss the choices they made in groups.

Other suggestions involve adding information. To do this, a student could do timed writings in a number of ways: they could complete a timed writing about the piece being worked on, or they could do a timed writing to compose a new beginning or ending. Another idea involved pointing the finger randomly at the piece, and at the end of the nearest sentence or paragraph, the student writes the words "For example" and continues from there.

I thought there were also valuable ideas regarding writing from a different point of view. For example, a student could write a narrative of an important real life moment, emphasizing something funny or unpleasant; then, the student could write the same piece emphasizing something serious. After both pieces are completed, the student could write a combination of the two.

I found it most interesting that much of the revising involved drafting a new piece, or portion of the piece. I hadn't looked at revising this way before. I think this is a good concrete way to look at revision that would really help students make improvements on their paper.