Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition
To be a scholar is to be a writer—often a writer seeking publication. Part of my career-long journey to teach writing well, or at least always trying to teach writing better, has been to bring the necessarily reduced experience of writing as a student closer to the authentic experiences of writers in situations, for lack of the better phrase, in the real world.
Recently on Twitter, scholars (notably Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco) discussed choices scholars/writers make when working through the revise-and-resubmit phase common in almost all submissions for scholarly publication:
This! With every single-authored journal article I've ever published, there was a point post-R&R where I started over with a blank document. Better to start fresh and build the right foundation than try to tinker with something that needs a new core. twitter.com/tressiemcphd/s…
Encouraging and facilitating drafting by students has always been a struggle for me. Some students resist drafting at all (I have students who fear sharing drafts with me until they are “perfect” and many students simply do not have the tools to revise and edit in ways that make the process seem valuable), but I also recognize that an authentic writing process and the many ways we draft are often more complicated than we allow in classrooms.
Two problems at the root of working with students and fostering an effective CONTINUE READING: Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition – radical eyes for equity