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Revision is arguably the heart of the writing process, but teachers and students may sidestep the complexities in favor of the quick finish. By surfacing the classroom ecologies and practices involved in supporting student writers, the authors discover revision as a site for the development of agency.
Many students enter college without really ever having been asked to rethink their views on an issue or to restructure the approach they've taken in an essay. They've been trained in how to find and fix mistakes, and perhaps even in how to respond to specific questions about a draft posed by their teacher. But their final drafts are essentially the same as their first ones-only cleaner, smoother, more polished. They have been taught how to edit but not how to revise.
-Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts
Revision is arguably the heart of the writing process, but many teachers and students sidestep the complexities in favor of the quick finish. Teachers may decide they don't have time for a further round of drafting, and many students are eager to be "done" with a paper rather than look for ways to improve it. Yet revision is too important to push aside-our work has led us to believe that when revision is at the center of classroom practice, it can be a powerful site for the development of student voice, agency, and community.
Our focus on revision grew out of our involvement with the National Writing Project's College, Career, and Community Writing Program (C3WP), a collaborative inquiry into the teaching of source-based argument writing being led by numerous NWP teachers across the country. Its culminating project invites students to engage in extended research on an issue they care about, develop their own perspective within the ongoing conversation of other authors and texts, and contribute their writing to effect change. C3WP draws on works that demystify academic writing, such as Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing and Joseph Harris's Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. C3WP teaches revision through targeted lessons that focus on particular argument skills, such as adding nuance to one's claims or establishing the credibility of one's sources. Rather than a...