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Grant-Davie, Keith. "Introduction." Reader 21 (1989): 2-21. <http://www.hu.mtu.edu/reader/online/21/kdg21.html>. Rereading in the Writing Process Keith Grant-Davie One of the things we urge inexperienced writing students to do before turning in their work is to proofread it and try to edit at least some of the errors we expect to find. Editing and proofreading are good habits to instill, but there is a danger that our students may learn to equate rereading their writing with a quick screening for errors and infelicities. In fact, as our own experience can tell us, good writers do not reread just for mechanics or even for style. Rereading is much more than quality control applied to an essentially finished product. Rereading may occur at any point during the development and production of a piece of writing, and it guides the design, testing, and redesign involved in that process. Rereading often leads to more writing or to revision at the level of meaning; and indeed, writers seem to be able to make few revisions of any kind without first rereading. Many studies of writers composing and revising have observed rereading as a contributing activity, and my aim in this essay is to bring together these studies' observations about rereading. I will begin by examining the purposes of rereading and then review what the research offers in answer to the following questions: What rereading patterns characterize skilled writers' composing processes? When do writers first develop the habit of rereading? What difficulties do novice writers have with rereading? When can writers dispense with rereading? What happens to writing when writers are prevented from rereading it? I will conclude by discussing the implications for future research and teaching. The term itself, rereading, suggests that it is a second or subsequent reading of a draft. We read our drafts for the first time while composing them, reading and writing being inextricable as we watch the words appear on the page or screen. The main limitation of this initial reading is the relatively slow pace of composing. As Frank Smith has pointed out, slow reading bogs a reader down in the visual details of the text, obstructing comprehension and causing "tunnel vision" (36-37). In this sense, reading the text for the first time as we dictate it to our fingers is a little like reviewing a movie frame by frame. Rereading lets us "animate" the individual words and phrases of a passage to see how they look together when set in motion. Donald Murray calls this the retrospective, evaluative function of rereading–to let readers discover what they have written and compare it with what they meant. But animating individual words and phrases can also provide the momentum we need to write the next passage, and Murray calls this other function of rereading prospective and generative: to discover what the freshly written passage suggests about the form, content, and direction of the passage about to be written (Murray 1980, 7-12). Murray argues that writers shift into the role of their "other self," the first reader of their writing, to gain distance from it, to stand back from the close-in work of crafting sentences (Murray 1982, 142). As their own first readers, they are still closer to their draft than other readers would be but can better estimate how it might sound to those other readers than when they are writing. When we talk about gaining distance from a draft, we mean gaining distance from the mental position or stage of thinking that produced the draft. Gaining distance from this position, usually by setting the draft aside for a period of time, provides writers with a different perspective, one that helps them either confirm the validity of what they have written or discover better alternatives. Detaching from the point of view they had while writing also allows writers to simulate the intended audience's perspective or, as Deborah Brandt argues, to maintain a common ground or "we-ness" with their audience: "It is only by keeping in touch with this shared reality, by not getting lost, that a writer comes to mean" (120). However, gaining distance from the original point of view is not the only purpose of rereading. When I have set a draft aside to cool, I remember only the gist of it. When I resume work on it, I reread all or part of it to refresh my memory before writing anything further. This kind of delayed rereading, or pausing while writing to reread some earlier pages, allows writers to return from the gist to the particulars, to recall the details of the draft and its structure–in short, to gather it up again and resume full authority over it. Rereading can, therefore, allow a skilled writer both to step back from a freshly written passage and to reestablish contact with the sensibility that produced an earlier-writen passage. We might call these kinds of rereading rhetorical, in the sense that they monitor the relationship between the emerging draft, the writer's purpose, and the audience's likely reaction. A number of studies of composing and revising have compared writers at different levels of skill or experience: basic writers and traditional students, first-year students and upper-level students, student and professional writers. This research, reviewed below, suggests that skilled writers tend to reread rhetorically and in a greater variety of ways than less skilled writers. Rereading Patterns Associated with Skilled Writers Skilled writers typically reread their writing more often, and they reread at a greater variety of points in their composing processes. They are more apt to reread completed drafts, and they engage their texts at higher levels of abstraction–at the rhetorical and structural levels as well as at the level of spelling, grammar, and mechanics. Generalized as it is from several studies, this rereading profile does not describe how all skilled writers reread whenever they write–and a later part of this essay looks at instances when skilled writers reread little or not at all–but the profile does reflect the rereading patterns that a number of studies have found associated with skilled writers. Skilled Writers Reread More Often C. K. Stallard found that good twelfth-grade writers paused to reread much more often than average twelfth graders (216), and Sharon Pianko noticed a similar trend among first-year college students: traditional students interrupted their writing to rescan it more often than remedial students, who would scan the room rather than their drafts (14). Studying younger writers, June Cannell Birnbaum found that the more proficient fourth- and seventh-grade writers paused more often while writing to reread and plan. They had a greater range of alternative strategies at their disposal, and their sense of rhetorical purpose made them better able not only to choose among these alternatives but also to explain what they had been thinking while writing. By contrast, the less proficient writers were "enmeshed at the surface level of the task" and had more difficulty explaining their writing activities. Since their only purpose for writing was "to write neatly and correctly about an assigned topic," their only purpose for reviewing their writing was to check it for error (253-55). Birnbaum's profile of rereading habits by the better fourth-and seventh-grade writers appears again in Annette Schneider's study of college writers. The skilled writers in her study spent longer on the writing task, and reread for 25% of this time, as opposed to the 7% spent by the less skilled writers (76). Also, the subject of the skilled writers' rereading was mostly their own writing, whereas the less skilled writers spent as much time rereading the assignment as rereading their drafts (83). Skilled Writers Reread for a Wider Variety of Purposes Schneider found that the skilled writers used rereading to boost their writing in a number of different situations: to edit and solve problems, to confirm or disconfirm their perceptions of the draft, or to help them find and give shape to new ideas (123-24). She describes their rereading and writing rhythms as an "ebb and flow," with frequent, brief rereading episodes and no conscious decision to reread until the writer neared the end of the draft. Skilled writers would reread after long periods of continuous drafting, and they would reread if these drafting periods were becoming shorter. If they reached a sticking point, they would reread to maintain or regain their composing momentum, and they would reread before and after making evaluative comments about the draft. Both skilled and unskilled writers would reread when attempting certain cohesive ties–especially contrastive ones–but the unskilled writers depended on a smaller range of cohesive ties, and their texts tended to be less coherent (101-2). The skilled writers, on the other hand, often followed their rereading with changes that improved the coherence of their texts (111). Skilled Writers are More Willing to Reread In a study of twelfth-graders, Brian Monahan found that the competent writers were more likely than the basic writers to reread and revise a draft once they had completed it (299). Lillian Bridwell's study of twelfth-graders' revising strategies revealed that the revisions rated most successful resulted from the writer rereading the first draft (212). Papers that had been revised between drafts were more likely to be rated highly than those which had been revised extensively during the writing of the first draft. In some of the papers, apparently, the extensive mid-draft revisions were only superficial, as the writers were "mired in spelling and mechanical problems during drafting." Rereading between drafts appeared to lead to higher-level revisions (211, 216-17). Skilled Writers Reread at Higher Levels of Abstraction The same kind of association that Bridwell found between the level of abstraction at which revision takes place and the quality of the writing appears in Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte's study of inexperienced students, advanced students, and expert adults. Faigley and Witte found that expertise was more associated with the kind of revision than with the quantity. The experts made the least number of revisions but a greater percentage of changes to the meaning of their drafts than either of the other two groups. The inexperienced students made more revisions than the experts, but they changed the surface of their texts for more than the meaning. Of the three groups, the advanced students made by far the most revisions, but when compared with the experts they made a smaller percentage of those revisions at the level of meaning (407). The less experienced writers in this study, presumably, had more surface errors to cope with, and could not see more meaningful problems beneath the surface, while the more experienced writers made fewer surface errors and postponed working on the ones they did make. The advanced and expert writers began to make their surface-level revisions after the second draft, at which point the inexperienced students had almost stopped revising. The inexperienced writers had managed only 12% of their revisions to their first drafts at the level of meaning. However, in the second part of their study, Faigley and Witte asked expert writers to revise the same first drafts of the inexperienced writers, and the experts altered the meaning of the drafts in 65% of the changes they made (409). While this percentage certainly suggests that expert writers are more apt to revise at the level of meaning, we should bear in mind that asking writers to revise other people's drafts as if they were their own invites revisions at the meaning level. The studies reviewed above indicate that rereading is a much more meaningful activity for skilled writers than for less skilled writers. Skilled writers reread frequently and at all levels of abstraction, and they use rereading to help them in many different situations as they write. Some of the studies of young writers reviewed in the next section suggest that theses characteristic differences in rereading habits may appear almost as soon as children learn to write. The Development of Rereading in Young Writers When do writers first develop the habit of rereading their writing? Studies of children composing are still too few to offer more than tentative answers to this question. However, they provide evidence that some children do reread their writing and that some mix reading with writing even before they can produce connected discourse. Linda Leonard Lamme and Nancye M. Childers studied three children, aged between two and four years old, composing together. For these children, composing was an enjoyable, communal activity in which reading played an important part. They planned, reread, and revised, and they wrote and drew, sharing their work and offering each other advice (41-48). In a study of first graders, Anne Haas Dyson also observed children rereading what they had written. As with the children Lamme and Childers observed, Dyson's subjects seemed to have been preoccupied with the task of encoding language into letters, and they reread mainly to check on spelling (426,431). It appears that some young children readily engage in rereading, even if only at the word level, as soon as they learn to write. Rereading behavior appears quite clearly in the studies of young children's writing conducted by Donald Graves and his associates. One of Graves' associates, Grant Cioffi, reports tracking the work of a girl and boy through the first and second grade. Like Lamme and Childers, Cioffi found that reading played an important part in both children's writing, particularly the girl's. They reread and edited their writing often, generally to check spelling, but they occasionally reviewed what they had written to make higher level, organizational changes (175-88). Among seven-year-olds, Graves himself distinguished two types of writers. Reactive writers, typically boys, seldom reread their writing, limiting their proofreading to the level of individual words; whereas reflective writers, usually girls, reread and adjusted words or phrases more often. Graves adds that individual children could show a combination of reactive and reflective characteristics, and that this combination might change under various writing conditions (236). It is interesting that the girls seemed more inclined to reread than the boys, and the possible influence of gender on rereading might be worth further research. Lucy Calkins, another researcher who worked with Graves, noticed four patterns of revising among twenty third-graders. "Random drafters" seemed to work only in the present, never looking back to reread their writing. If they made any changes, they made them by adding new material at the end of the draft or by beginning a new draft. "Refiners" were children who reread but had difficulty finding a place to insert new information and left what they had already written essentially unchanged. The third group, children in a "transitional stage," were similar to the refiners except that they were less satisfied with the drafts when they reread them. The fourth group Calkins called "interactors," children who reread to discover what they had written, to make changes, and to discover what they might write next. Calkins notes that this group of nine-year-olds showed a flexibility and complexity in their composing which bears comparison with Donald Murray's self-described writing process. Her study is particularly interesting because it reveals a range of composing and rereading practices at the third-grade level similar to the range that other researchers have noticed in basic and competent writers at the college level. Here is another third grader, quoted by Robert Tierney and Margie Leys, on the subject of rereading and revising a draft:
This third grader's remarks, suggesting a remarkably mature attitude to writing, are all the more striking when compared with the following remarks on rereading and revising gathered by Cynthia Selfe from Jim, a first-year college student anxious about writing:
Ineffective Rereading Patterns Rereading Too Little The comments quoted above from Jim are, I suspect, typical of many novice writers who see writing as a penance. Their main goal when drafting is to "get it over with" as soon as possible, and they avoid or hurry through rereading because it delays closure. Selfe's study of the reading and writing processes of first-year college students who were apprehensive about writing supports the findings of Stallard, Pianko, and Birnbaum mentioned earlier–that novice writers tend to reread less often. While writing apprehension does not necessarily lead to poor writing, its symptoms constrain the writing process unproductively. Selfe found that her apprehensive students disliked writing and tried to rush through it as quickly as possible. Jim, for instance, spent less than half as much time rereading as David, who typified the confident writers in the study. And when Jim did interrupt this drafting to reread, it was only at a very low level of abstraction: to prompt his memory for particular words or to check for surface errors, rather than to discover changes in the content, structure, and rhetorical appeals of the paper, or to help him decide the direction of the next passage. A similar distinction appeared when Jim and David reread completed drafts, with Jim unwilling to make more than superficial error corrections. Selfe attributes his unwillingness to revise not so much to his dislike of writing as to his limited range of reading and writing skills (Selfe 1986, 54-59). Rereading Too Much and Editing Too Soon Unlike Selfe's anxious writer and Schneider's unskilled students, who reread and edited little, Perl's students reread frequently and suffered from premature editing, a preoccupation with surface correctness which continually interrupted their drafting. "What they seem to lack as much as any rule," Perl observes, "is a conception of editing that includes flexibility, suspended judgment, the weighing of possibilities, and the reworking of ideas" (333). A similar pattern of excessive rereading and premature editing characterized the composing processes of Mike Rose's "high blockers," the students in his study who felt frustrated and anxious about their writing because they possessed basic skills but had difficulty applying them fluently and efficiently to a writing task (3). Rose attributes their premature editing to several causes: lack of confidence in their editing skills, one-shot drafting, dependence on incremental planning during the draft, rules and assumptions about language and composing that led to excessive caution, or a desire to "monkey around" with language, letting a fondness for the perfect word interrupt their fluency (73). Some novice writers are ineffective rereaders because they find and attend to too many sentence-level problems too soon in their drafting process. Others, however, are ineffective because they miss problems when they reread their drafts. Failing to See Problems in Drafts Nancy Sommers has noted that novice college writers often do not recognize dissonance between what they mean and what they have written–largely, she argues, because they reread their writing at much lower levels of abstraction than experts, finding and solving problems only at the level of words and sentences (381-87). Sommers' observations are borne out in Richard Beach and Sara Eaton's study of first-year students revising. Beach and Eaton found that first-year students who reread their drafts merely reconfirmed that the drafts represented what they meant and focused their attention on the content of what they had said rather than on their reasons for saying it (163). Furthermore, when some of the first-year students reread their drafts with a view to revising them, they would represent the drafts to themselves in the form of a narrative. Beach and Eaton speculate that they may have reverted to a story-telling mode to help them achieve the distance necessary to evaluate the draft from a reader's perspective, but by turning their texts into narratives, these students limited their range of revisions, making only the kinds of revision that would be appropriate for narratives (164). Beach and Eaton's students modified their drafts at a structural level, but they were making changes in their heads rather than on the page, and the purpose of the changes appeared to be to make the composing process easier rather than to make the composition rhetorically more effective. Making Miscues In addition to misrepresenting their drafts to themselves, as Beach and Eaton's subjects did, some novice writers make a large number of miscues–they read substitutes for some of the words on the page. Schneider's less skilled writers who suffered from this problem seemed aware of and frustrated by their miscues (99-101), but the basic writer of Monahan's case study was apparently unaware of orally correcting errors that remained uncorrected on paper as he reread his draft. The unskilled first-year college students in Sondra Perl's study, too, made miscues as they reread their drafts. One student "supplied the missing endings, words, or phrases and did not seem to 'see' what was missing from the text." By "reading in" the meaning he expected to find on the page, he became "a reader of content rather than form" (326). Perl found that these students, as a group, "reduced uncertainty by operating as though what was in their heads was already on the page" (332). All writers make miscues from time to time, reading what they expect rather than what is on the page, and even expert writers miss errors in their writing as they proofread, but some novice writers may make so many miscues that they are effectively reading a different text from the one they have written. Consequently, they will not notice disparities, or dissonance, between the text on the page and the one they have in mind. Skilled writers discover problems and possibilities when they reread, but many novice writers appear to do the reverse, either unwittingly or deliberately concealing problems and limiting their options. When they make their drafts fit a more familiar schema by recasting them into a simpler, narrative mode, and when they fail to recognize discrepancies between their intentions and their achievement, novice writers are simplifying their drafts, mentally revising them into a form they can bring quickly to closure. Two contrasting profiles of ineffective rereaders emerge from the studies described above. At one extreme, there are the "rushers," like the writers observed by Selfe, Monahan, and Schneider, who reread little in their hurry to complete the assignment. They avoid rereading lest it complicate and prolong a composing process they already find too demanding, and when they do reread, some of them are blind to problems in their drafts at any level of abstraction. At the other extreme, there are the "blockers" who appear in the Perl and Rose studies, writers who pause and reread so often that it interferes with their completion of assignments. Their writing process slows with the friction of attending to too many problems at the sentence level. Both rushers and blockers engage their texts mainly at a local, editorial level rather than a global level. They share the same inflexibility and limited control over their composing and rereading activities. Perhaps the only real difference between them is that one group is ensnared in the trap of unproductive rereading while the other evades the trap by doing little or no rereading, either productive or unproductive. Perhaps rushers fear that spending more time rereading would only turn them into blockers–less efficient, and no more effective. To distinguish blocking and rushing is not to say that they are mutually exclusive approaches to composing. One of Selfe's apprehensive first-year student writers, Bev, combined blocking and rushing characteristics. She did not enjoy writing and would put off an assignment until the last possible moment, then "write furiously" to finish it as quickly as possible. She was not happy with what she wrote but lacked the ability (and therefore the confidence) to tackle structural revisions. Instead, she allowed herself to be distracted for a quarter of her drafting time by local editing problems (Selfe 1985). The studies of writers who edit their writing prematurely point out that rereading is not always a useful composing activity. Furthermore, as Muriel Harris has observed, there are successful writers in graduate school and beyond whose first draft is usually their final draft and who seldom reread what they have written. Instead of rereading and revising the draft on paper, they rehearse it extensively at the pre-text stage, before writing it down. Harris argues that there are pros and cons to the single and multiple-draft styles of composing: the single-drafters usually meet deadlines but may sacrifice thoroughness for efficiency while the multiple-drafters allow themselves more opportunity to make careful choices and discover new options but sometimes protract their writing process beyond deadlines. Harris recommends that we teach our students to balance the strengths of both composing styles rather than insisting that one or the other is better (182-90). In my experience, however, novice writers suffer much more often from the drawbacks of one-shot drafting than from those of excessive revising. Due to apprehension, lack of time, or some other reason, they do not reread much, and when they do, they may see only what they thought they had written. We need to teach our students to reread both at levels which lead to meaningful revision and in ways that sustain the momentum of their writing. However, while trying to teach these balanced rereading skills, we also need to keep in mind another proviso–that there are some writing situations which seem not to demand rereading. The following section looks at two quite different situations when writers can write effectively without pausing to reread their drafts–when writing stylized documents with familiar structures or formats and when freewriting. Writing Without Rereading Writing Stylized Documents Jack Selzer's case study of an engineer's writing processes suggests that in some rhetorical situations writers may write effectively without returning to their drafts to do more than polish and edit them. Selzer's engineer was confident and well-prepared, made detailed outlines, and followed a linear composing process, spending only 5% of his time revising (183-84). One of the keys to this highly efficient writing process is that he spent 80% of his composing time planning. Another is that, while this engineer's audiences changed, the other elements of the rhetorical situations he encountered remained the same. Selzer notes that "since he writes certain kinds of documents again and again, his consideration of purpose has become ingrained, almost second nature" (179-80). When writers develop schemata for familiar rhetorical situations and kinds of discourse, they do not need to pause and reread to discover purpose. Ann Matsuhashi noticed this at the high school level, too, when she observed that the writer in her case study needed to reread less often and for shorter periods when reporting than when generalizing. He was more familiar with the schema for linear, narrative organization than with the schema he needed to generalize from his experience (283-85). Freewriting The two studies by Selzer and Matsuhashi lend support to a conclusion that seems intuitively right: that we need to reread less when we are following a familiar plan of organization than when we are trying to discover meaning by rearranging ideas. On the other hand, my own experience is that I make some of my most important discoveries of meaning when freewriting in a journal. Rather than being a slow, painstaking, recursive process with many pauses to reread, the writing I do in my journal proceeds briskly, and I may fill several closely handwritten pages without feeling an urge to reread. This kind of fast, sustained writing differs in several respects from the kind of rush to closure that Selfe observed in the apprehensive writers. First, the writing is self-assigned; I freewrite willingly. Second, there is little at stake, since I will be the only critical reader of my journal. And third, my goal when I freewrite is not to write as little as Ican get away with as quickly as I can but to write for as long as it takes to answer the question or record the idea that made me take up pen and paper. However, this kind of writing tends be disorganized–my journal is more for invention than for arrangement–and only isolated sentences or phrases find their way from the journal to the draft of an article. It would seem, then, that writers have little need to reread either when they can follow a familiar schematic organization like a narrative or when they are free from organizational constraints. Rereading becomes a more important writing strategy when a writer is trying both to discover and arrange words simultaneously–for example, when trying to give readers a transition between two passages that have been cut and pasted together from different parts of a draft. In such situations, rereading becomes a strategy for creating coherence, as Matsuhashi found in her study of writers' activities during pauses. Longer pauses, to make global decisions about the draft, were characterized either by rereading or gazing away from the text (287). In all the studies reviewed so far, writers could reread if they chose, but some researchers have studied the importance of rereading in the composing process by having their subject produce invisible writing, thereby preventing the writers from rereading. The importance of rereading for maintaining coherence appears again in these studies. Invisible Writing James Britton and his associates describe an informal experiment to discover the effects of writing without being able to reread. They wrote with dry ball-point pens but used carbon paper so that they could later review what they had written. They found they could write letters and simple narratives without rescanning but could not keep track of an argument or the structure of a poem (Britton 1975, 35). Britton concludes from this experience that the primary value of rereading is to help generate the next passage, rather than to evaluate the one just written (Britton 1980, 62). Sheridan Blau's experiments with invisible writing aimed to test Britton's "common-sense" assumptions and findings and produced quite different results. Like Britton, he found that narrative writing was no harder to write in the invisible mode but invisible writing actually helped his subjects to write expository and persuasive discourse and poetry. Blau argues that invisible writing prevents the writer from editing prematurely by freeing him or her from the distraction of surface structure (an analogy might be drawn to racehorses that run better when their peripheral vision is limited by blinkers). Blau also argues that writing invisibly helps by forcing the writer to hold the developing text in memory: "This extra burden on the writer's memory is likely to improve the quality of his thinking by keeping him attentive to his thoughts at a level that may be deeper than the surface structure of the words he would otherwise be able to read on the page" (306). However, Blau concedes that the subjects in his experiment may have been aided by the personal nature of the topics on which they write and by the fact that they composed for no longer that ten minutes at a time (308-09). Margaret Atwell's study comparing basic writers with traditional students as they wrote both visibly and invisibly also asked subjects to write for ten minutes in each mode. She found that both groups wrote less fluently and less grammatically in the invisible mode but that the basic writers were more affected by the inability to reread. The moderate coherence of their texts broke down in the invisible mode–in part, Atwell speculates, because they were writing without structural plans. Lacking plans, the basic writers were left only with local units of text–phrases and words–to guide them forward (115-18). The difference between experienced and inexperienced writers' structural command of their drafts appears in a similar study by Glynda Hull and William Smith. Hull and Smith looked at the persuasive writing of graduate students and basic writers writing visibly and invisibly for an hour in each mode. Unlike Atwell, they found that writers were able to maintain their fluency, error rate, and "habitual syntax" when writing invisibly but that there were more noticeable differences between the two groups and the two modes beyond the sentence level (973). The overall quality of the invisibly writen essays was judged lower, and clause length shortened, but the most telling differences between the two modes and the two groups were in the writers' methods of connecting sentences. When the graduates wrote invisibly, they used a greater percentage of remote cohesive ties and a smaller percentage of local ties than when they wrote visibly, apparently relying on their sense of the gist of their essays to maintain coherence. The basic writers did the opposite: when writing in the invisible mode, more of their ties were local and fewer remote, but the local ties were awkward and inappropriate. Here, Hull and Smith agree tentatively with Atwell that the inexperienced writers may have been forced to attend more to sentence connectedness because they had no global plans to guide them when writing invisibly (974-75). Hull and Smith conclude that "the significance of visual feedback lies not in editing or manipulating syntax but in managing larger units of discourse" (976). Discussion The studies of invisible writing raise a number of questions. For instance, how would a writer like Jim, Selfe's anxious student who rushed through his drafts with hardly a backward glance, manage invisible writing? Would such a writer miss the visible draft less? And would writers who block be helped by writing invisibly, as Blau's study suggests they might, or would the inability to rescan hinder them further by removing a prop and thereby adding to their anxiety? Could the compulsive and apparently unproductive rescanning and editing of words and phrases actually be an important part of some writers' composing rhythms in certain rhetorical situations? Taken together, the composing process studies reviewed in this essay present tantalizing glimpses of the rereading practices and motives that characterize writers of different ages and skill levels. They suggest that in most situations rereading is a valuable strategy, one that proficient writers employ at a variety of points in their composing processes and for a variety of purposes. They also suggest that rereading is less important in some types of discourse, in some rhetorical situations, and for some writers who have developed an effective single-draft style of composing. However, these studies do not resolve the questions of when and how skilled writers learn to reread their writing at a level that leads to large-scale planning and substantive revision. Are the rereading habits we see in young adult writers laid down in grade school or are they influenced by later instruction and writing experiences? Do we teach, or at least reinforce, unproductive rereading habits by editing our students' essays closely while making only vague comments about the rhetorical and structural aspects of the writing? A reluctance to reread may stem partly from the assignments we give–the rhetorical situations in which we place our students. Studying above-average twelfth graders, Janet Emig found that her subject reread frequently while writing but rewrote school-sponsored drafts only at the mechanical level (61-62, 67-68); and Terry Mischel's subject occasionally reread his writing and made minor revisions but aimed to write as quickly as possible and to correct as little as possible (309). Neither of these students used rereading to reformulate the writing they did for school. Brian Monahan suggests that when writing for school, students may revise little because they lack commitment to the task or to the teacher as audience and therefore do not notice much dissonance between what they meant and what they have written (301). If we want to foster more frequent, perceptive rereading by our students, we could begin by looking for ways to make their writing matter to them. They need to see it not just as a finger exercise but as something that has potential value and relevance beyond the grade it receives–something that is worth reading. However, designing writing assignments in which students can find a real sense of purpose will probably not be enough to cause more than the usual hasty proofreading of first drafts. We need to instill different reading and writing habits. For most students, reading is something they are occasionally assigned–and if they are lucky, taught–to do to the writing of other people, who are usually professional writers. Few students who enter my advanced writing classes are accustomed to reading each other's writing or their own, and few know how to read a draft for revision. Many believe that their writing should be read only by the teacher, although they may proofread in an effort to preempt the expected red pencil. As far as they have gathered from past experiences, their job responsibility in a writing class extends to writing, and it is the teacher's responsibility to do all the reading and correcting. Obviously, these expectations do not prepare students for the kind of active, adaptive, productive rereading we want them to do, the kind that characterizes the composing processes of skilled writers. Workshops can help, providing students with a live audience and bringing reading into the writing process, but developing writers need to be taught how to read drafts and how to give more than just the standard "default" response: "Sounds fine to me. just clean up the grammar and spelling." They need to see that by reading peers' drafts–and rereading their own–they can find rhetorical and structural problems, not just slips of the hand. However, rhetorical and structural problems are unwelcome discoveries for novice writers because they take up time and are difficult to cope with; a fear of finding them may be why many students prefer to leave the stones in their drafts unturned. So, as we teach student writers to resee their drafts, we also need to give them the skills and confidence to tackle the problems they discover. And while we teach the retrospective and evaluative functions of rereading, we should not forget to teach its prospective, generative uses as well; proficient writers use rereading to help them invent, plan, and draft, as well as to troubleshoot. Our students need to learn to reread at various points and for different reasons. Most of us exhort our students to reread, but I suspect that few of us directly teach the uses (and misuses) of rereading. The best current textbooks offer detailed advice guiding students through the process of generating and organizing ideas for a draft, and they also provide lists of questions which prompt students to examine specific problems in their own and peers' drafts. These heuristics help, but they work best as reminders to writers who already know what the questions mean and how to respond to them. Novice writers need more instruction and might benefit from seeing a teacher demonstrate how rereading is integrated into a proficient composing process. For example, with sufficient courage and self-confidence, a teacher might try to reveal rereading by thinking aloud while drafting on a blackboard or overhead projector. Even better, the teacher might show a videotape of this process made earlier, stopping the tape occasionally to explain how rereading was being used . This kind of demonstration could help students realize the purposes of rereading and could lead them to discuss ways to include it in their own composing processes. Rereading is important to writing competence. To sum up the value of rereading, we might say that skilled writers use it to give themselves mobility within and around a draft. They reread to move forward and backward within a draft, or to move up and down the levels of abstraction between gist and particular details. Rereading lets them move in close to the draft to remind themselves of what they were trying to say and it lets them step away to see whether what they have said might make sense to the intended audience. At any time during or after the writing of a draft, skilled writers may reread both to evaluate what they have written and to prompt further writing. They reread to strengthen their drafts at the rhetorical, structural, stylistic, and mechanical levels. We need further research to help us understand how writers develop such sophisticated control of text, and we need to look for ways to help our students acquire it. University of Maryland, College Park |
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