A common discussion I have with other faculty: Drafts, and how to encourage students to take them seriously. Many of us have had the experience of strategically and sympathetically trying to articulate our feedback to our students in a way that makes clear what needs are most important for students to address between drafts; and many of us have experienced the exhausted feeling of defeat when our students correct a few misspellings, rewrite a sentence, and ship their paper back off.

It’s important to talk to our students in the classroom about what we mean when we say or ask for revision (sometimes evoking the quip, as in to “re-see”).

As a strategy, I try to make the process of revising feel real and necessary by changing the stakes of the assignment.

That could mean one of a few things:

• Requiring a longer final draft, or an ongoing word count per assignment
• Scaffolding assignments together so that the student can build upon, or even use, previous writing to continue a thread, or offer a new “chapter” towards an ongoing topic
• Changing the intended audience, often to one that is broader or “higher stakes.” Perhaps the first draft was the “small town newspaper” version, while the final draft is the “national magazine” evolution.
• Using different rubrics to grade each draft. For example, I place heavy grade emphasis on turning in first drafts that are on-topic, in full, on-time, and peer-reviewed, while final drafts are graded for their ability to synthesize and respond to feedback (including with a cover letter that articulates their revision decisions).

This approach—reframing the final product for revision—accomplishes a few pedagogical goals at once:

1. It makes the experience of revision feel purposeful.
2. It adds to an evolutionary/developmental attitude towards revision.
3. It gives students a sense of the way writing is a matter of pacing and trajectory.
4. It allows students to self-identify what they feel like is lacking from their first drafts.
5. It gives students agency in choosing how to concentrate their efforts in revision, given the feedback/suggestions/tasks they have received.

Additionally, I separate out “revision/editing” and “proofing” both as concepts and on my schedule. At the end of the course, students concentrate on smaller-scale “proofing” of their final portfolios in the last weeks of the semester, generally while they are remediating or presenting on some portion of their work.