Revision: Writing or Fixing?

This question has really had me thinking recently: Does having a student revise after I’ve assessed a paper truly help the student learn to write?

I’ve always thought it was a good thing to require a student who receive low scores to revise their essay. I thought, “Well, I don’t want them to get a bad grade. That would crush them. At least this way they can get it right.” Yes, over the course of the year, a bad grade on a paper might not be great for them. What’s worse than that, though? Sending them out of high school without ever learning to recognize how to make their own writing better.

Let me put it this way. Imagine your phone, GPS, friend who always gives you directions, etc., has died (RIP direction friend). You’re driving to a place you’ve been many times, but every time you’ve driven this route you've always had some navigation voice interrupting that song you always sing at least twenty decibels too loud (or your conversations, for you normal people out there).

What happens without your navigation system?

If you’re like me, suddenly every corner looks like the turn you’re supposed to take. Four hours later you find yourself on the side of the road with no gas, a dead phone (hopefully not your dead friend), and that exasperated feeling where you think, “But I’ve done this so many times. How could I screw up so badly?”

You never really learned how to do it; you only learned how to follow directions.

I worry that this is sometimes what happens to students who are constantly revising their papers after the teacher hands them back a low score. The teacher hands them their bleeding paper with every mistake highlighted, and the student then must go back over the same essay they’ve already grown to hate. They revise, wish upon a star, and then bring it back. You can repeat this process as many times as you want. 

What doesn’t the student learn? How to write well. They learn how to fix really, really, really well, though. If they ever get a test where someone shows them everything that’s wrong in a paper, they will pass with flying colors (at least one of the times they turn it in). 

Please don’t think I’m saying that fixing mistakes is a bad thing. I think there are certain stages of writing where it could be helpful for the teacher to help a student edit their paper. We all know that it would be helpful at any stage for a student to actually edit their paper.

But does forced revision really help them write? 

We’ve always been told to wait for students to respond to our questions in class. If we give them the answer, they can be passive and just get by. They never have to learn anything except how to work the system. I fear that the same thing goes for writing. They know that if they submit a paper that they plagiarized from a drunken pirate, the teacher will go through in painstaking detail and show them all of their wrong turns. They don’t have to learn to find the right route themselves; they have their built in writing navigation system. 

Shouldn’t we be encouraging students to learn to recognize the weak spots in their papers by themselves? We need to point out how students can make their papers better, but instead of just going back and fixing their paper, why don’t they write a new one and focus on what they’ve learned? That way we can celebrate with them when their next essay shows growth instead of mourning when we realize we have to regrade the same paper we just finished grading, but this time even less effort went into it. 

I’ll leave you with this question: Are we making our students dependent on our skills or their own?