Very Late Reflection on Perl and Sommers

(As I emailed Jerry, I had a very long day yesterday and didn't get to read and post on time, so I apologize to you all as well for my lateness.)

The Perl essay was very meticulously written and dense, loaded with figures and terms I had a hard time following, although she did keep my interest for most of it. After much rereading and effort to figure out how they worked, I was impressed by the coding systems they used to conduct their research on how "unskilled" writers write and what behaviors they exhibited showed patterns of repetition in other test subjects. It intrigued me that I exhibited a lot of the behaviors that Tony and other case studies produced in their writing processes (i.e. editing within the first few sentences of writing), but then it also struck me that I exhibited just as many behaviors as the experienced writers that Sommers writes about, so I stopped feeling apprehensive about my abilities. (So far I haven't done much editing in this post.) Then I began to wonder about other writers' writing and revision habits, students, "beginners," and experts alike. I thought, especially reading about Tony's tendency to have more trouble writing efficiently on a topic he was not familiar with and could not relate to his own experiences, that this issue of repetition and evasion is a common experience for anyone talking or writing about something they are not well-versed on; and thus I thought maybe that is why "beginner" or "unskilled" writers are lacking in ability, motivation, and desire to improve their written work. Building experience really is necessary for developing writing skills (not getting caught on linear and other models, like Sommers describes, being very important here) and consequently revision skills. It certainly takes an extraordinary amount of time, effort, exposure, and education to become a proficient writer and reviser, and I know I'm far from being there, and probably most people are as well.

I find myself somewhere in the middle of the entire spectrum of non-writers to the best of the bunch, but on the spectrum of college students, certainly above average. I can reflect on my improvement, more aptly in this case in editing, since I have been actively editing since the eighth grade for the newspaper and yearbook and for peers and siblings. I find that most of my early editing was primarily focused on correcting sentence-level issues, grammar, and punctuation, yet over the years I have learned to better piece together ideas and explanations, quotes and paragraphs, etc. When I edit my younger brother's high school papers, I notice that I am no longer just telling him to change "there" to "their" or alter the phrasing a bit. I am helping him develop his ideas and flesh them out in a more appropriate order of progression, and I've noted his improvement on those areas as well (though he is still trapped in the grade-by-format style that stifles his higher level of thinking and reduces it to an "afterthought"-promoting model of "revision" that in fact "function[s] to restrict and circumscribe not only the development of their ideas, but also their ability to change direction of these ideas" (Sommers 383) thereby making both writing and revision moot). I hate to see my brother caught up in rules, training his brain to process the world through the established, conventional, and inefficient methods he is taught, so I do my best to rework his conceptions of education and give it some value, something he is inclined to do but is forced to avoid five days a week, six hours a day (although failing some of his classes proves to me he is unable to submit himself to conceptions he doesn't agree with). But at the same time, I'm doing this for myself -- and it's exhausting. I guess that's the result of working class aspiration though -- something I'm not willing to give up on for myself, or my brother, even though it can be frustrating. Seeing my older brother's progress in education has gotten me this far, and still gets me moving forward. The young one just has some catching up to do, at the beginning of something.