Perl and Sommers

The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers

This paper is about a study of five unskilled college writers. The research had three questions. They wanted to find out how they write, can their process be analyzed, and what does if they can understand their process what does it say about how writing is taught in schools. They picked students who were unskilled in their writing and the some decided to participate in the study. They met with a researcher for five 90 minute sessions where the researcher took a nonactive role and the student wrote and talked out loud about how they were writing their papers. Three kinds of data was collected, students written products, their tapes of them composing and their responses to the interview. researchers wanted to find out movements within the composing process which are Standardized, Categorical, Concise, Structural and Diachronic. The method that they used made them code each composing behavior and chart them. The categorical divisions were talking, reading, and writing but all of these varied. The second thing they had to do was construct a time line and a numbering system. Through the charts they could tell things like how much time was spent on prewriting and what strategies were used. They found that people like Tony for example did prewrite, write and edit, but he did it all at once which stopped his writing process and made it more difficult. When he spoke out loud his ideas were clear and complete but they didn't make it onto the paper in the same way. When the students did their prewriting, they were given a few minutes and they tried to break down the topic into manageable parts , they would rephrase the topic until it connected with their experience, or they would try to find associations to a word in the topic. When they started this way, they were able to get a sense of where they wanted to go. When it came to writing, students would write then stop and reread and try to digest what they wrote. The students did produce flawed products but they do understand and in some ways preform some of the most important steps in writing. Editing is something that the students did, but grammar and stlye problems still remained in their final product. She states that unskilled writers are not beginners and teachers need to understand that. Teachers need to find the writing characteristics of their students and find what the problems are. When you're teaching composing you need to pay attention to the forms and products but also to the process.
Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers
Sommers believes that revision has been overlooked and that is because the writing process has directed it's attention away from revision. She states the Rohman's process of writing goes from prewriting to writing then to rewriting. Britton's model is conception, incubation and production. Both of these theories model themselves after speech and are linear. To linear methods revision is like and afterthought in talking. When talking there is no room for revision. Sommers found when looking at students and their revision process that they were not comfortable with word at all. Students had their own terminology, such as reviewing and redoing. Students look at revising as a way to find a different word and to cross out a word and put another in its place. Students have strategies to find different words but they lack the strategies to deal with the essay as a whole and find and correct a bigger problem. Experienced writers have said that they try to find the frame of their argument when they are revising. the experienced writers envision an audience when they are revising. Experienced writers understand the importance of resolving their dissonance in their writing.
Each of these authors do make valid points about writing. From my experience I understand that students do go into college not having a firm hold on writing in general but I have noticed that people do say things out loud that make sense but as soon as the pen hits the paper that idea is incomplete. So when Sommers says that revision is impossible in terms of speech I do not find necessarily true, from my own experiences with kids mostly is that when they say something out loud they are able to correct their mistakes in their writing. I however do feel that I did not have a clear concept on revision in high school because it was not about the paper as a whole, it was more about finding grammar problems and structure.