By Kim Liao
There’s a reason that so many composition professors assign Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” in first-year writing classes: it offers us permission to write badly, write wildly, write crazily. Get that shitty first draft down on paper, is the tacit promise made in the classroom, and we will help you revise it into a sparkling final draft.
Yet while I have found numerous craft books focused on getting that first draft down, I’ve never found a book that successfully conquered the complex task of revision. In the classroom, I teach revision over the course of a full semester: I comment on drafts; students hold peer review in writing groups; and together, we cut drafts up physically with scissors and re-arrange the structure. But in a one-hour tutoring appointment at the Writing Center, it can feel daunting to translate all of these facets of revision into one meaningful experience with a student. How do I help a student see her own written work with fresh and purposeful eyes?
This spring at the Writing Center, I began to focus on the idea of visual “mapping” of written ideas and syntactical chunks of language. This strategy emerged as I discussed the anatomy of a successful introductory paragraph with numerous students across academic genres, realizing that I see my own writing through a visual lens. However, while outlining is probably the most popular visual organization tool for brainstorming, not every student sees their ideas in a logical, sequential, numbered array (especially before drafting begins!). Many of the best and most creative ideas unfold organically in a non-sequential flow; thus, perhaps a better way of organizing or linking ideas for some students might be an idea web, a concept map, or another non-sequential picture of the relationship between texts and ideas.
As a writer who revises her work by re-envisioning a sloppy first draft with a map of my ideas (which I think of this as a planning outline to govern my revision), I realized that consultants could be seen as expert cartographers. We have mastered a number of familiar and effective writing structures; yet rather than trying to shoehorn students into a formulaic approach to revising and re-structuring, perhaps what we can really offer is skill-building in the art of cartographic revision. By this, I mean that showing students how to create their own meaningful maps of ideas, paragraphs, or sentences can offer them a valuable tool for drilling down to the heart of what they truly want to say. Maps can help young writers see how their own thoughts flow and understand how they make connections. Mapping can also help writers consciously choose a revision strategy that mirrors and complements their own thought patterns.
Cognitive scientists cite “dual coding theory” as one reason why visual organizational strategies work for writers of all backgrounds. To put it simply, dual coding theory proposes that when we learn something verbally, we also encode some type of visual imagery attached to the verbal word or concept. So in some ways, we learn to attach meaning through both verbal and visual/spatial means. Thus, if we map our ideas as spatial concepts that relate to one another, perhaps we can then create new spaces (both literally and figuratively) for new connections between ideas to develop.
For example, I discovered after mapping paragraph structures in several ways that it could be useful for a student to know that they could start a paragraph anywhere. A paragraph could begin at its midpoint, by describing its core evidence; alternatively, a paragraph could begin with its topic sentence or with a transition referring to the ideas raised in the previous paragraph. One student preferred to write all of her sentences out in no particular order as they occurred to her. Then, once she could look at all of the sentences as discrete spatial objects, she arranged them into a map of the paragraph by numbering them and drawing arrows to indicate their sequence and causality.
Likewise, mapping language within a sentence could offer a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type of visual strategy, with different origins leading to different possible grammatical outcomes. In one appointment, we used alternate maps of singular-singular or plural-plural constructions to help an English Language Learner keep track of subject-verb agreement. The idea that a single choice that you make at the beginning of a sentence creates a domino effect of other choices—and that there are several different yet equally valid ways of phrasing a thought—can be very empowering. Dividing these sentence components into manageable visual “chunks” helps students map out their options and make thoughtful choices about language and grammar.
Not every aspect of the writing process can or should be mapped visually. However, offering our students visual mapping as a tool for revision – whether to assess what is already on the page, plan goals for revision, or arrange new additions to a draft in a meaningful order – can help students become linguistic cartographers. This feeling of empowerment in tackling the revision process can help our students use language to forge new knowledge, and that is really what scholarship is all about.
Published July 23, 2019
