Essay

 

Task:

For this essay, you will analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the rhetoric in ONE of the assigned readings listed below. This means you will need to first identify the occasion, purpose, main argument, and audience of the text. Then, you will analyze how the argument is supported (logos), how the author’s credibility is established (ethos), and how it connects to the audience’s emotions (pathos). You should ultimately be making a claim about the rhetoric’s effectiveness.

Assigned Readings:

• “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language” by Mike Rose
• “Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Adult Writers” by Nancy Sommers

Organization:

For this essay, you must have the following sections in the following order:

I. Introduction

This section should identify the text’s title, author, and where it was published as well as establishing why the text is worth examining in depth before providing the thesis statement.

II. Background – Rhetorical Situation

This section should focus on providing the reader with information about the rhetorical situation. You should identify the occasion, purpose, and audience if not mentioned already in the introduction. The main argument should be briefly summarized. You may use quotes or paraphrases to support the other identifications.

III. Argument – Rhetorical Appeals

This section should analyze the logos, ethos, and pathos. The analysis section can be organized chronologically (the first paragraph covers all notable appeals in the first section of the text, then the second all in the second section, and so on) or by appeal (each paragraph focuses on a single appeal and draws examples from the whole text). Both have their advantages and disadvantages. This should be the longest section of the essay.

IV. Argument – Evaluation

This section makes the final connections needed to prove your thesis by determining the overall effectiveness of the rhetoric. For this essay, that means proving one of the following three options: 1) ethos, pathos, and logos are very strong, 2) one of the appeals is weak but the other two are strong enough or more important, or 3) two of the appeals are weak but the one most important for convincing that audience is very strong. An appeal is considered effective if it can achieve the author’s purpose for the intended audience according to the constraints of the genre and occasion.

V. Conclusion Section

This section reminds the reader of the thesis and why the findings are important.­

Tips for Success:

• Remember that these are both articles written for important academic journals in the field of composition.
• Choose examples from throughout the text even if you are not using the chronological order.
• Draft one section at a time. Especially if you find yourself very busy, dividing the essay into smaller parts can give you easier goals.
• Avoid using first or second person. The kind of essay this is does not call for either.

Requirements:

• Follows given organization pattern (do not include headings)
• Properly cited textual evidence from one assigned reading
• 1000+ words (excluding Work Cited page)
• MLA format

The following content is partner provided
 

RevisionStrategies of Student Writers

and Experienced Adult Writers
NANCY SOMMERS

Nancy Sommers, formerly Director of Composition at the University of Oklahoma, is now

Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University. She has taught writing at Boston

University, the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and the Polaroid

Corporation. An NCTE Promising Researcher for her studies of the processes of revising,

she is writing a research monograph on revision.

[page 378]

ALTHOUGH VARIOUS ASPECTS of the writing process have been studied

extensively of late, research on revision has been notably absent. The reason for

this, I suspect, is that current models of the writing process have directed attention

away from revision. With few exceptions, these models are linear; they separate

the writing process into discrete stages. Two representative models are Gordon

Rohman’s suggestion that the composing process moves from prewriting to

writing to rewriting and James Britton’s model of the writing process as a series of

stages described in metaphors of linear growth, conception—incubation—

production.1 What is striking about these theories of writing is that they model

themselves on speech: Rohman defines the writer in a way that cannot distinguish

him from a speaker (“A writer is a man who … puts [his] experience into words in

his own mind” —p. 15); and Britton bases his theory of writing on what he calls

(following Jakobson) the “expressiveness” of speech.2 Moreover, Britton’s study

itself follows the “linear model” of the relation of thought and language in speech

proposed by Vygotsky, a relationship embodied in the linear movement “from the

motive which engenders a thought to the shaping of the thought, first in inner

speech, then in meanings of words, and finally in words” (quoted in Britton, p.

40). What this movement fails to take into account in its linear structure—”first …

then … finally” —is the recursive shaping of thought by language; what it fails to

take into account is revision. In these linear conceptions of the writing process

revision is understood as a separate stage at the end of the process—a stage that

comes after the completion of a first or second draft and one that is temporally

distinct from the prewriting and writing stages of the process.3

The linear model bases itself on speech in two specific ways. First of all, it

is based on traditional rhetorical models, models that were created to serve the

spoken art of oratory. In whatever ways the parts of classical rhetoric are

[page 379]

described, they offer “stages” of composition that are repeated in contemporary

models of the writing process. Edward Corbett, for instance, describes the “five

parts of discourse”—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio—and,

disregarding the last two parts since “after rhetoric came to be concerned mainly

with written discourse, there was no further need to deal with them,”4 he produces

a model very close to Britton’s conception [inventio], incubation [dispositio],

production [elocutio]. Other rhetorics also follow this procedure, and they do so

not simply because of historical accident. Rather, the process represented in the

linear model is based on the irreversibility of speech. Speech, Roland Barthes

says, “is irreversible”:

“A word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it. To

cross out here is to add: if I want to erase what I have just said, I cannot do it

without showing the eraser itself (I must say: ‘or rather. . .’ ‘I expressed myself

badly . . .’); paradoxically, it is ephemeral speech which is indelible, not

monumental writing. All that one can do in the case of a spoken utterance is to

tack on another utterance.5

What is impossible in speech is revision: like the example Barthes gives, revision

in speech is an afterthought. In the same way, each stage of the linear model must

be exclusive (distinct from the other stages) or else it becomes trivial and

counterproductive to refer to these junctures as “stages.”

By staging revision after enunciation, the linear models reduce revision in

writing, as in speech, to no more than an afterthought. In this way such models

make the study of revision impossible. Revision, in Rohman’s model, is simply

the repetition of writing; or to pursue Britton’s organic metaphor, revision is

simply the further growth of what is already there, the “preconceived” product.

The absence of research on revision, then, is a function of a theory of writing

which makes revision both superfluous and redundant, a theory which does not

distinguish between writing and speech.

What the linear models do produce is a parody of writing. Isolating

revision and then disregarding it plays havoc with the experiences composition

teachers have of the actual writing and rewriting of experienced writers. Why

should the linear model be preferred? Why should revision be forgotten,

superfluous? Why do teachers offer the linear model and students accept it? One

reason, Barthes suggests, is that “there is a fundamental tie between teaching and

speech,” while writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible.”6

The spoken word cannot be revised. The possibility of revision distinguishes the

written text from speech. In fact, according to Barthes, this is the essential

difference between writing and speaking. When we must revise, when the very

idea is subject to recursive shaping by language, then speech becomes inadequate.

This is a matter to which I will return, but first we should examine, theoretically, a

detailed exploration of what student writers as distinguished from experienced

adult writers do when they write and rewrite their work. Dissatisfied with both the

linear model of writing and the lack of attention to the process of revision, I

conducted a

[page 380]

series of studies over the past three years which examined the revision processes

of student writers and experienced writers to see what role revision played in their

writing processes. In the course of my work the revision process was redefined as

a sequence of changes in a composition—changes which are initiated by cues and

occur continually throughout the writing of a work.

METHODOLOGY

I used a case study approach. The student writers were twenty freshmen at Boston

University and the University of Oklahoma with SAT verbal scores ranging from

450—600 in their first semester of composition. The twenty experienced adult

writers from Boston and Oklahoma City included journalists, editors, and

academics. To refer to the two groups, I use the terms student writers and

experienced writers because the principal difference between these two groups is

the amount of experience they have had in writing.

Each writer wrote three essays, expressive, explanatory, and persuasive,

and rewrote each essay twice, producing nine written products in draft and final

form. Each writer was interviewed three times after the final revision of each

essay. And each writer suggested revisions for a composition written by an

anonymous author. Thus extensive written and spoken documents were obtained

from each writer.

The essays were analyzed by counting and categorizing the changes made.

Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and

reordering. And four levels of changes were identified: word, phrase, sentence,

theme (the extended statement of one idea). A coding system was developed for

identifying the frequency of revision by level and operation. In addition,

transcripts of the interviews in which the writers interpreted their revisions were

used to develop what was called a scale of concerns for each writer. This scale

enabled me to codify what were the writer’s primary concerns, secondary

concerns, tertiary concerns, and whether the writers used the same scale of

concerns when revising the second or third drafts as they used in revising the first

draft.

REVISION STRATEGIES OF STUDENT WRITERS

Most of the students I studied did not use the terms revision or rewriting. In fact,

they did not seem comfortable using the word revision and explained that revision

was not a word they used, but the word their teachers used. Instead, most of the

students had developed various functional terms to describe the type of changes

they made. The following are samples of these definitions:

Scratch Out and Do Over Again: “I say scratch out and do over, and that

means what it says. Scratching out and cutting out. I read what I have

written and I cross out a word and put another word in; a more decent

[page 381]

word or a better word. Then if there is somewhere to use a sentence that I

have crossed out, I will put it there.

Reviewing: “Reviewing means just using better words and eliminating

words that are not needed, I go over and change words around.”

Reviewing: “I just review every word and make sure that everything is

worded right. I see if I am rambling; I see if I can put a better word in or

leave one out. Usually when I read what I have written, I say to myself,

‘that word is so bland or so trite,’ and then I go and get my thesaurus.”

Redoing: “Redoing means cleaning up the paper and crossing out. It is

looking at something and saying, no that has to go, or no, that is not right.”

Marking Out: “I don’t use the word rewriting because I only write one

draft and the changes that I make are made on top of the draft. The

changes that I make are usually just marking out words and putting

different ones in.

Slashing and Throwing Out: “I throw things out and say they are not good.

I like to write like Fitzgerald did by inspiration, and if I feel inspired then I

don’t need to slash and throw much out.”

The predominant concern in these definitions is vocabulary. The students

understand the revision process as a rewording activity. They do so because they

perceive words as the unit of written discourse. That is, they concentrate on

particular words apart from their role in the text. Thus one student quoted above

thinks in terms of dictionaries, and, following the eighteenth century theory of

words parodied in Gulliver’s Travels, he imagines a load of things carried about to

be exchanged. Lexical changes are the major revision activities of the students

because economy is their goal. They are governed, like the linear model itself. By

the Law of Occam’s razor that prohibits logically needless repetition: redundancy

and superfluity. Nothing governs speech more than such superfluities; speech

constantly repeats itself precisely because spoken words, as Barthes writes, are

expendable in the cause of communication. The aim of revision according to the

students’ own description is therefore to clean up speech; the redundancy of

speech is unnecessary in writing, their logic suggests, because writing, unlike

speech, can be reread. Thus one student said, “Redoing means cleaning up the

paper and crossing out.” The remarkable contradiction of cleaning by marking

might, indeed, stand for student revision as I have encountered it.

The students place a symbolic importance on their selection and rejection

of words as the determiners of success or failure for their compositions. When

revising, they primarily ask themselves: can I find a better word or phrase? A

more impressive, not so clichéd, or less hum-drum word? Am 1 repeating the

same word or phrase too often? They approach the revision process with what

could be labeled as a “thesaurus philosophy of writing”; the students consider the

thesaurus a harvest of lexical substitutions and believe that most problems in their

essays can be solved by rewording. What is revealed in the students’ use of the

thesaurus is a governing attitude toward

[page 382]

their writing: that the meaning to be communicated is already there, already

finished, already produced, ready to be communicated and all that is necessary is

a better word “rightly worded.” One student defined revision as “redoing”;

“redoing” meant “just using better words and eliminating words that are not

needed.” For the students, writing is translating: the thought to the page, the

language of speech to the more formal language of prose, the word to its

synonym. Whatever is translated, an original text already exists for students, one

which need not be discovered or acted upon, but simply communicated.7

The students list repetition as one of the elements they most worry about.

This cue signals to them that they need to eliminate the repetition either by

substituting or deleting words or phrases. Repetition occurs, in large part, because

student writing imitates—transcribes—speech: attention to repetitious words is a

manner of cleaning speech. Without a sense of the developmental possibilities of

revision (and writing in general) students seek, on the authority of many

textbooks, simply to clean up their language and prepare to type. What is curious,

however, is that students are aware of lexical repetition, but not conceptual

repetition. They only notice the repetition if they can “hear” it; they do not

diagnose lexical repetition as symptomatic of problems on a deeper level. By

rewording their sentences to avoid the lexical repetition, the students solve the

immediate problem, but blind themselves to problems on a textual level; although

they are using different words, they are sometimes merely restating the same idea

with different words. Such blindness, as I discovered with student writers, is the

inability to “see” revision as a process: the inability to “re-view” their work again,

as it were, with different eyes, and to start over.

The revision strategies described above are consistent with the students’

understanding of the revision process as requiring lexical changes but not

semantic changes. For the students, the extent to which they revise is a function of

their level of inspiration. In fact, they use the word inspiration to describe the ease

or difficulty with which their essay is written, and the extent to which the essay

needs to be revised. If students feel inspired, if the writing comes easily, and if

they don’t get stuck on individual words or phrases, then they say that they cannot

see any reason to revise. Because students do not see revision as an activity in

which they modify and develop perspectives and ideas, they feel that if they know

what they want to say, then there is little reason for making revisions.

The only modification of ideas in the students’ essays occurred when they

tried out two or three introductory paragraphs. This results, in part, because the

students have been taught in another version of the linear model of composing to

use a thesis statement as a controlling device in their introductory paragraphs.

Since they write their introductions and their thesis statements even before they

really discovered what they want to say, their early attention to the thesis

statement, and generally the linear model,

[page 383]

function to restrict and circumscribe not only the development of their ideas, but

also their ability to change the direction of these ideas

Too often as composition teachers we conclude that students do not

willingly revise. The evidence from my research suggests that it is not that

students are unwilling to revise, but rather that they do what they have been

taught to do in a consistently narrow and predictable way. On every occasion

when I asked students why they hadn’t made any more changes, they essentially

replied, “I knew something larger was wrong, but I didn’t think it would help to

move words around.” The students have strategies for handling words and phrases

and their strategies helped them on a word or sentence level. What they lack,

however, is a set of strategies to help them identify the “something larger” that

they sensed was wrong and work from there. The students do not have strategies

for handling the whole essay. They lack procedures or heuristics to help them

reorder lines of reasoning or ask questions about their purposes and readers. The

students view their compositions in a linear way as a series of parts. Even such

potentially useful concepts as “unity” or “form” are reduced to the rule that a

composition, if it is to have form, must have an introduction, a body, and a

conclusion, or the sum total of the necessary parts.

The students decide to stop revising when they decide that they have not

violated any of the rules for revising. These rules, such as “Never begin a

sentence with a conjunction” or “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” are

lexically cued and rigidly applied. In general, students will subordinate the

demands of the specific problems of their text to the demands of the rules.

Changes are made in compliance with abstract rules about the product, rules that

quite often do not apply to the specific problems in the text. These revision

strategies are teacher-based, directed towards a teacher-reader who expects

compliance with rules—with pre-existing “conceptions”——and who will only

examine parts of the composition (writing comments about those parts in the

margins of their essays) and will cite any violations of rules in those parts. At best

the students see their writing altogether passively through the eyes of former

teachers or their surrogates, the textbooks, and are bound to the rules which they

have been taught.

REVISION STRATEGIES OF EXPERIENCED WRITERS
One aim of my research has been to contrast how student writers define revision

with how a group of experienced writers define their revision processes. Here is a

sampling of the definitions from the experienced writers:

Rewriting: “It is a matter of looking at the kernel of what I have written,

the content, and then thinking about it, responding to it, making decisions,

and actually restructuring it.”

Rewriting: “l rewrite as I write. It is hard to tell what is a first draft

because it is not determined by time. In one draft, I might cross out three

[page 384]

pages, write two, cross out a fourth. rewrite it. and call it a draft. I am

constantly writing and rewriting. I can only conceptualize so much in my

first draft—only so much information can be held in my head at one time;

my rewriting efforts are a reflection of how much information I can

encompass at one time. There are levels and agenda which I have to attend

to in each draft.”

Rewriting: “Rewriting means on one level, finding the argument, and on

another level, language changes to make the argument more effective.

Most of the time I feel as if I can go on rewriting forever. There is always

one part of a piece that I could keep working on. It is always difficult to

know at what point to abandon a piece of writing. I like this idea that a

piece of writing is never finished, just abandoned.”

Rewriting: “My first draft is usually very scattered. In rewriting, I find the

line of argument. After the argument is resolved, I am much more

interested in word choice and phrasing.

Revising: “My cardinal rule in revising is never to fall in love with what I

have written in a first or second draft. An idea, sentence, or even a phrase

that looks catchy, I don’t trust. Part of this idea is to wait a while. I am

much more in love with something after I have written it than I am a day

or two later. It is much easier to change anything with time.

Revising: “It means taking apart what I have written and putting it back

together again. I ask major theoretical questions of my ideas, respond to

those questions, and think of proportion and structure, and try to find a

controlling metaphor. I find out which ideas can be developed and which

should be dropped. I am constantly chiseling and changing as I revise.

The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding

the form or shape of their argument. Although the metaphors vary, the

experienced writers often use structural expressions such as “finding a

framework,” “a pattern,” or “a design” for their argument. When questioned about

this emphasis, the experienced writers responded that since their first drafts are

usually scattered attempts to define their territory, their objective in the second

draft is to begin observing general patterns of development and deciding what

should be included and what excluded. One writer explained, “l have learned from

experience that I need to keep writing a first draft until I figure out what I want to

say. Then in a second draft, I begin to see the structure of an argument and how

all the various sub-arguments which are buried beneath the surface of all those

sentences are related.” What is described here is a process in which the writer is

both agent and vehicle. “Writing, says Barthes, unlike speech, “develops like a

seed, not a line,”8 and like a seed it confuses beginning and end, conception and

production. Thus, the experienced writers say their drafts are “not determined by

time,” that rewriting is a “constant process,” that they feel as if (they) “can go on

forever.” Revising confuses the beginning and end, the agent and vehicle; it

confuses, in order to find, the line of argument.

After a concern for form, the experienced writers have a second objective:

a concern for their readership. In this way, “production” precedes “conception.”

[page 385]

The experienced writers imagine a reader (reading their product) whose existence

and whose expectations influence their revision process. They have abstracted the

standards of a reader and this reader seems to be partially a reflection of

themselves and functions as a critical and productive collaborator— a collaborator

who has yet to love their work. The anticipation of a reader’s judgment causes a

feeling of dissonance when the writer recognizes incongruities between intention

and execution, and requires these writers to make revisions on all levels. Such a

reader gives them just what the students lacked: new eyes to “re-view” their work.

The experienced writers believe that they have learned the causes and conditions,

the product, which will influence their reader, and their revision strategies are

geared towards creating these causes and conditions. They demonstrate a complex

understanding of which examples, sentences, or phrases should be included or

excluded. For example, one experienced writer decided to delete public examples

and add private examples when writing about the energy crisis because “private

examples would be less controversial and thus more persuasive.” Another writer

revised his transitional sentences because “some kinds of transitions are more

easily recognized as transitions than others.” These examples represent the type of

strategic attempts these experienced writers use to manipulate the conventions of

discourse in order to communicate to their reader.

But these revision strategies are a process of more than communication;

they are part of the process of discovering meaning altogether. Here we can see

the importance of dissonance; at the heart of revision is the process by which

writers recognize and resolve the dissonance they sense in their writing.

Ferdinand de Saussure has argued that meaning is differential or “diacritical,”

based on differences between terms rather than “essential” or inherent qualities of

terms. Phonemes,” he said, “are characterized not, as one might think, by their

own positive quality but simply by the fact that they are distinct.”9 In fact,

Saussure bases his entire Course in General Linguistics on these differences, and

such differences are dissonant; like musical dissonances which gain their

significance from their relationship to the “key” of the composition which itself is

determined by the whole language, specific language (parole) gains its meaning

from the system of language (langue) of which it is a manifestation and part. The

musical composition—a “composition” of parts—creates its “key” as in an overall

structure which determines the value (meaning) of its parts. The analogy with

music is readily seen in the compositions of experienced writers: both sorts of

composition are based precisely on those structures experienced writers seek in

their writing. It is this complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in

the work of experienced writers which destroys the linear model; writing cannot

develop “like a line” because each addition or deletion is a reordering of the

whole. Explicating Saussure, Jonathan Culler asserts that “meaning depends on

difference of meaning.”10 But student writers constantly struggle to bring their

[page 386]

essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers do

the opposite: they seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with

their writing, in revision. They seek to emphasize and exploit the lack of clarity,

the differences of meaning, the dissonance, that writing as opposed to speech

allows in the possibility of revision. Writing has spatial and temporal features not

apparent in speech—words are recorded in space and fixed in time—which is why

writing is susceptible to reordering and later addition. Such features make

possible the dissonance that both provokes revision and promises, from itself, new

meaning.

For the experienced writers the heaviest concentration of changes is on the

sentence level, and the changes are predominantly by addition and deletion. But,

unlike the students, experienced writers make changes on all levels and use all

revision operations. Moreover, the operations the students fail to use —

reordering and addition — seem to require a theory of the revision process as a

totality — a theory which, in fact, encompasses the whole of the composition.

Unlike the students, the experienced writers possess a non-linear theory in which

a sense of the whole writing both precedes and grows out of an examination of the

parts. As we saw, one writer said he needed “a first draft to figure out what to

say,” and “a second draft to see the structure of an argument buried beneath the

surface.” Such a “theory” is both theoretical and strategical; once again, strategy

and theory are conflated in ways that are literally impossible for the linear model.

Writing appears to be more like a seed than a line.

Two elements of the experienced writers’ theory of the revision process

are the adoption of a holistic perspective and the perception that revision is a

recursive process. The writers ask: what does my essay as a whole need for form,

balance, rhythm, or communication. Details are added, dropped, substituted, or

reordered according to their sense of what the essay needs for emphasis and

proportion. This sense, however, is constantly in flux as ideas are developed and

modified; it is constantly “re-viewed” in relation to the parts. As their ideas

change, revision becomes an attempt to make their writing consonant with that

changing vision.

The experienced writers see their revision process as a recursive process—

a process with significant recurring activities—with different levels of attention

and different agenda for each cycle. During the first revision cycle their attention

is primarily directed towards narrowing the topic and delimiting their ideas. At

this point, they are not as concerned as they are later about vocabulary and style.

The experienced writers explained that they get closer to their meaning by not

limiting themselves too early to lexical concerns. As one writer commented to

explain her revision process, a comment inspired by the summer 1977 New York

power failure: “I feel like Con Edison cutting off certain states to keep the

generators going. In first and second drafts, I try to cut off as much as I can of my

editing generator, and in a third draft, I try to cut off some of my idea generators,

so I can make sure

[page 387]

that I will actually finish the essay.” Although the experienced writers describe

their revision process as a series of different levels or cycles, it is inaccurate to

assume that they have only one objective for each cvcle and that each cycle can

be defined by a different objective. The same objectives and sub-processes are

present in each cycle, but in different proportions. Even though these experienced

writers place the predominant weight upon finding the form of their argument

during the first cycle, other concerns exist as well. Conversely, during the later

cycles, when the experienced writers’ primary attention is focused upon stylistic

concerns, they are still attuned, although in a reduced way, to the form of the

argument. Since writers are limited in what they can attend to during each cycle

(understandings are temporal), revision strategies help balance competing

demands on attention. Thus, writers can concentrate on more than one objective at

a time by developing strategies to sort out and organize their different concerns in

successive cycles of revision.

It is a sense of writing as discovery—a repeated process of beginning over

again, starting out new— that the students failed to have. I have used the notion of

dissonance because such dissonance, the incongruities between intention and

execution, governs both writing and meaning. Students do not see the

incongruities. They need to rely on their own internalized sense of good writing

and to see their writing with their “own” eyes. Seeing in revision—seeing beyond

hearing—is at the root of the word revision and the process itself; current dicta on

revising blind our students to what is actually involved in revision. In fact, they

blind them to what constitutes good writing altogether. Good writing disturbs: it

creates dissonance. Students need to seek the dissonance of discovery, utilizing in

their writing, as the experienced writers do, the very difference between writing

and speech —the possibility of revision.

Notes
1. D. Gordon Rohman and Albert O. Wlecke, “Pre-writing: The Construction and

AppIication of Models for Concept Formation in Writing,” Cooperative Research

Project No. 2174, U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health, Education,

and Welfare; James Britton, Anthony Burgess, Nancy Martin, Alex McLeod,

Harold Rosen, The Development of Writing Abilities (11—18) (London:

Macmillan Education, 1975).

2. Britton is following Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in T. A. Sebeok,

Style in Language (Cambridge. Mass: MIT Press, 1960).

3. For an extended discussion of this issue see Nancy “The Need for Theory in

Composition Research.” College Composition and Communication, 30 (February

1979),40-49.

4. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (New York: Oxford University Press,

1965), p. 27.

5. Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” in Image-Music-Text, trans.

Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 190-191.

6. “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” p. 190.

7. Nancy Sommers and Ronald Schleifer, “Means and Ends: Some Assumptions of

Student Writers,” Composition and Teaching, II (in press).

[page 388]

8. Writing Degree Zero in Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans.

Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 20.

9. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York, 1966), p. 1 19.

10. Jonathan Culler, Saussure (Penguin Modern Masters Series; London: Penguin

Books, 1976), p. 70.

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to express her gratitude to Professor William Smith,

University of Pittsburgh, for his vital assistance with the research reported in this article and to

Patrick Hays, her husband, for extensive discussions and critical editorial help.

 

Rhetorical Situation
Rhetorical Feature	Identification What is it?	Textual Evidence What suggests that answer?	Explanation Why does that text suggest that answer?
Occasion	To teach	based on the responses of freshman college students and experienced writes	Title of essay, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”
Audience	Teachers	This study was based on the responses of freshman college students and experienced writes.	sequence of changes in a composition
Purpose	To persuade teachers and students that revision is an important key to a good essay	Writer sees their revision process as a recursive process, each cycle of writing is important seek to discover meaning in revisions imagine a reader when writing, helps influence their revision process	Sommers suggested that writers should focus on the idea of the work, elaborate those ideas, and find a position for their work
Argument/Message	How to revise a paper	She explains that the students did not see revision as something they actually do but as a term their instructor uses	Sommer ending words, “Good writing disturbs: it creates dissonance. Students need to seek the dissonance of discovery, utilizing in their writing, as the experienced writers do, the very difference between writing and speech- the possibility of revision”

 

Logos

Effective appeal, logic of argument

Ethos

Rhetorical Appeals
Rhetorical Appeal	Textual Evidence What in the text makes that appeal?	Explanation How does it make that appeal?	Evaluation Why is this an effective or ineffective appeal?
	Logos	Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering. Also four levels of changes were identified: word, phrase, sentence, and theme. These methods were the most common among the writers as processes for revision.	Author used comparisons		Effective appeal , logic of argument
revision is understood as a separate stage at the end of the process—a stage that comes after the completion of a first or second draft and one that is temporally distinct from the prewriting and writing stages of the process	Audience will think that what author was saying makes sense
	Ethos	The study included twenty freshmen from Boston University and the University of Oklahoma with SAT verbal scores from 450-600. Also included twenty experienced writers, including editors and journalists. The examination consisted of writing three essays each (twice) with a total of nine essays. These essays were analyzed and categorized identifying different revision operations.	Use of credible source	Effective appeal, Author’s credibility and character
Nancy Sommers conducted a series of studies over three years in which she studied revision processes of student and experienced writers to see their methods of revision during their writing process	expression of experience	Effective appeal Author’s credibility and character
Pathos	Most of the students I studied did not use the terms revision or rewriting. In fact ,they did not seem comfortable using the word revision and explained that revision was not a word they used, but the word their teachers used.	author depicts vivid description	Effective, Author made her point with specific word and phrase about revision