Writing Teacher's Tribute to Gloria Gaynor: "I Will Revise!"

One of the most salient points in Jones's (2008) article was that researchers interested in revision need to account for writers' interaction with the "structural features of their environment" (p. 283). My first foray into comp studies research involved working with revision. In fact, although it's no longer a primary interest area, I have a "revise and resubmit" article on the back burner here about revision, waiting for some time to actually deal with it. Although it's been through a ton of iterations at this point, the editorial direction I received for this current revision suggests focusing on my use of response sheets for student revision. While Jones focused on the particular environment of Wikipedia, it seems the particular classroom structure I employed may also produce expectations for certain types of responses.

Jones's article was eye-opening for me on another level as well. I've used Wikipedia in my classroom before to talk about social construction of meaning as well as reliability of sources. When I had students update entries on Wikipedia, some were upset to see their information deleted or changed-- typically because they violated Wikipedia standards of non-bias. While I'll continue to include the discussion of socially constructed meaning and source reliability in future classes when I do a Wikipedia activity, I think I'll take a cue from Jones and also talk about this as a revision process. Based on his work, it does seem crucial to address the norms conveyed by instructions to our students to "revise." There's a great article by Armstrong and Paulson (May 2008) in TETYC, which attempts to survey the varied terminology associated with revision and the potential implications of that terminology, i.e. instructors sometimes have different intentions, and typically receive different responses when they decide to refer to "peer editing" vs. "peer critique" vs. "peer response" vs. "peer evaluation." It matters what we call things…

This (obliquely perhaps) seems to bring us back around to the socio-cultural assumptions involved in naming-- a theme which I see beneath the surface in the Kvasny & Igwe and Banks articles. Kvasny & Igwe refer to what they're studying as "the African American system of communication" (p. 571). Banks writes about "African American discourse" but he notes the proliferation of terminology: African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Black English, ebonics, creole, or "a complete language that is a member of the Niger-Congo language family" (p. 69).

While Banks mentions these different names, he doesn't get into the underlying assumptions behind the names, in fact Banks seems to skate on by it... I suspect that which name you chose does indeed matter. It may matter on a personal/practical level-- i.e. you chose one which has gone out of vogue and you look insensitive or uneducated. It may matter on a social level-- which one you choose may depend on who you're talking to, and your choice may influence how that audience responds to you. It may matter on a definitional level-- thinking of Ed Schiappa's work here-- when you choose a specific name, isn't it implying what you expect it "ought to be?" This in turn invokes layers of connotations. Something to think about during acts of revision.