Revision--teach your students it's not a dirty word

I was quite engaged in the past two weeks of reading for my Digital Writing class. Of course, 2 of the texts I read had me engaged in completely different ways. I'll begin with the one I don't plan to focus on in the blog: Bolter on Remediation (The title of the chapters is longer, but this is how we're referring to it in class. Bolter is the author, remediation the topic).

When I say I was engaged in this reading I mean that I barged out of the office into the living room to barrage my husband with the list of reasons why I will never give up books. I then called my best friend and asked her if she realized that not only are books running the risk of becoming obsolete, so are some current genres writing... like, maybe even the novel. She talked me off the ledge even after I explained some of the hypertext stories I had tried to read before slamming my laptop shut. P.S. I'm all for informational hypertext links, but I can't guarantee I'll ever warm to the idea of hypertext fiction. Way too frustrating. Give me a good old linear story and call me boring; I can take it. For the record, I understand that I was meant to get more out of the article, and I eventually did. But no matter the remediation that occurs with the continuing growth of digital writing, they will have to take my books out of my cold dead hands. (I think that's how the saying goes).

As for the other reading (Hicks chapter 3 to be exact) I was engaged in a "I am so going to try this in the next class I teach" kind of way. Chapter 3 was all about revision and writing process and the digital writing collaboration tools we can use to promote it. I was mildly pleased with myself when collaborative use of word processors was part of the list. It seems my course is not completely digitally defunct since I do use electronic commenting on all student drafts. Albeit, I use good old fashioned email attachments and not Google docs, but we're taking baby steps here.

But what got me all excited was the discussion of using wikis for collaborating and responding to writing. My course revolves around drafting, commenting, peer review, and revision, and it seems that a wiki is a logical tool to be using for these interactive purposes. (I note that a wiki could be particularly useful if I teach an online course). the fact that the wiki records and saves the history changes is a huge plus. As Hicks states so aptly, "... knowing that there is a history of changes allows the writer to make more than surface-level edits; because the old version is still there, it is easy to revert to it if a radical revision of a section of the text does not turn out as well as the writer might have hoped" (43). Let's face it, writing is hard even for the most experienced of us. Beginning writers can't imagine deleting something that it took them so long to come up with in the first place. As Erika Lindemann said, for students, revision is a dirty word that means they did something wrong in the first place that needs to be fixed. They aren't at the point where they can understand how to see new possibilities. Wikis might take some of the panic out of deep revision. As soon as I learn how to create and use one myself (I have no idea how at this point), I'll be exploring how to introduce them into my writing course.

As it is now, I encourage my students to save all the drafts I return with comments (as opposed to revising and saving right over them), and to cut and paste things into "overflow" documents so that they never feel like they lose a sentence, but I know they usually don't follow my advice. They grip what they've written with the same intensity with which I will be gripping my books when computers take over the world.