> Are my "kids" good writers? Not necessarily. I think, however, demonstrating
> early in the semester that the real world values clear thinking,
> easy-to-understand communication, and an awareness of spelling and grammar
> conventions doesn't hurt students.
Yup, I agree with all of this with one caveat: instead of
demonstrating this to students, I like to find ways for them to discover
the value of clear thinking, etc. But I also suspect that it's the
importance of those communicative values that drives the revision wheel
for Jan and other professional writers (me included). If I have one
quibble with the writing process model, it's that its creators looked at
what professional writers do and decided that's what everybody should do
-- without sufficiently accounting for WHY professional writers do what
they do. I think it's useless to force people to revise. When they're
trying desperately to say something that nobody's understanding, and
_then_ they start to revise, we can assume they've learned something
important about how to write. In other words, revision is a symptom of
good writing, not a cure for bad writing. If that makes any sense.
Marcy
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Marcy Bauman
Writing Program
University of Michigan-Dearborn
4901 Evergreen Rd.
Dearborn, MI 48128
Web page: http://www.umd.umich.edu/~marcyb
email: marcyb@umd.umich.edu
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