difficulty paper #1

In Nancy Sommers excerpt, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Writers,” she begins by stating, “Most of the students I studied did not use the terms revision or rewriting. In fact, they did not seem comfortable using the word revise…” Where in the world did she interview these students?! An elementary school? It seems that there was some sort of miscommunication between her and whoever she was interviewing as to what she was actually asking them about. She continues to say that students more commonly use the phrases, “Scratch out and do over again, reviewing, redoing, marking out,” and my personal favorite, “Slashing and Throwing Out.” I’ll give her reviewing and redoing, but the other three? It sounds like she threw those in there herself when she realized we are not all that inexperienced in writing. Sommers implies that us as student writers have not been properly taught how to revise a paper, and if this is actually what she is implying, I think all of our high school English teachers should take serious offense to this considering they spent most of our four years there explaining the importance of just that, revision! I find it hard to believe that Sommers research is at all accurate, especially because she does not once explain the criteria she used when interviewing student writers.
Sommers also continues on in her discussion to imply that we as students only understand the importance of a word by word revision process. Abusing the thesaurus, assuming we are only using it to make sure we are not being to repetitive in a word by word manner as opposed to a conceptual manner. Once again, if she is saying she did this study on college student, can we please have some credit? We were smart enough to get in, does that not count for anything? Again, I revisit the question of where did she interview these students? Were they English or journalism majors? Or did she interview math, engineer and biology majors? Or was it a mix of all majors?
On the other hand, when Sommers begins her discussion of the experienced writer, it is written with almost an entirely different connotation. She gives examples of their description of the revision process saying they use the more appropriate terms such as “revising” and “rewriting,” also explaining that the experienced writer is more aware of their audience. I find it difficult to assume that the student writer is not aware of their audience, when this is one of the first things we are taught of when learning to write well. She also states that the experienced writer’s work does not have a time limit; they can always be considered a work in progress. Although this may be somewhat true, as a college student, I can pretty much be sure that I’m speaking for most of us when I say we have set deadlines! And most of the time we use the allotted time to write a paper as thoroughly as possible.
Overall, I think this excerpt from Nancy Sommers needs some clearing up, and she leaves a lot of questions unanswered. She seems to be very biased when it comes to comparing the student writer and the experienced writer, and does not clarify where her sources are actually coming from.