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Sommers “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Writers”:

We have a dilemma as compositionalists: writing is linear, but thought and the writing process is not. Our student writers believe in the struggle “to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers do the opposite,” creating meaning in the revision process. (330)

Student vs. Expert Writers: On revision

• Student writers: never use the word “revision” (325) and focus on surface level wording, which is only describing your thoughts in a different way, instead of changing and learning different approaches to a subject/theme.
  

  “The students place a symbolic importance on their selection and rejection of words as the determiners of success or failure for their compositions.” (326)

  Repetition is a strong worry, but lexical repetition is not “diagnosed”. (327)
  Modification of ideas: Students don’t think revision is an activity to “modify and develop perspectives and ideas

  One Reason Why

  Since [students] write their introductions and their thesis statements even before they have really discovered what they want to say, their early close attention to the thesis statement, and more generally the linear model, function to restrict and circumscribe not only the development of their ideas, but also their ability to change the direction of these ideas. (327)

• Expert writers: Rewriting and revising are a way to “form or shape” their arguments, and the experienced writers discuss revision in “structural expressions such as ‘finding a framework,’ ‘a pattern,’ or ‘a design’ for their argument.” (329)
  

  “Revising confuses the beginning and end, the agent and vehicle; it confuses, in order to find, the line of argument.” (329)

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[Expert writers] 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.” (Sommers, 329)

[connecting Sommers and Bruffee]

…our task [as writing teachers] must involve engaging students in conversation among themselves at as many points in both the writing and the reading process as possible, and that we should contrive to ensure that students’ conversation about the way read and write is similar in as many ways as possible to the way we would like them eventually to read and write. (Bruffee, 551)

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Bruffee argues for collaborative learning as work “that promotes a sort of reacculturation,” where and when the students are changed somehow by the process. As Sommers may note, the writing process is not linear, but recursive, requiring conversation and restructuring of the ideas in revision rendering possibilities for change.

Bruffee contends that knowledge is socially constructed through the constant gardening or continuous state of “negotiation or conversation.” (555) He aligns with Rorty’s knowledge as a “social artifact,” and discusses the need for normal and abnormal discourse, beget by the teaching of practical rhetoric and critical analysis, so they can generate new knowledge. (557)

These processes undermine the current authority of the university/institution, where we as teachers are redefined as members of a knowledge community, where we can invite new members via the social channels of negotiation and conversation.