Bookmark this page, and return to it whenever you have a revision assigned to you.
From the course syllabus:
Most revisions will be optional, and you will have at least one week from the date you receive your score and feedback to submit a revision. No work handed in after a week will be accepted. In addition, for any revision to be considered, it must be submitted with the following: the original draft, the prompt, any rubric or separate grading commentary, and a reflection or guided annotation delineating what has been changed. This latter requirement will be dictated fairly often (i.e., you will be told to annotate your own writing or to write a reflection), but it must be completed, regardless of what is explicitly assigned. No revision work submitted without a reflection (or any of the other requirements) will be accepted for credit.
Note: The purpose of this reflective writing is to pace your revision process and to demonstrate to your teacher your understanding of the commentary provided for that process. You must revise with attention to all facets of that particular task, avoiding simple editing (for grammatical mistakes, for instance) and concentrating on deeper corrective work. With that in mind, a revision earning a higher grade than the original draft will usually replace that original draft’s grade. While it is difficult to earn a lower grade on a revision, it is possible, due to the higher standards held for revised writing; if this happens, the higher grade will be kept, and we will schedule a conference to discuss the revision.
Write the revision as you write the reflection, using each to fuel the other. Treat all subsequent drafts of a response as works-in-progress, and refer consistently and exhaustively to the DAMAGES+ rubrics and guidelines located here. When you are asked to type and submit your work online, follow these guidelines carefully. Use this checklist in a pinch:
- Set your timed writing in front of you
- Open up Word and format your document according to MLA standards
- Keep your DAMAGES+ writing guide close at hand
- Review the prompt, your notes, and any feedback or commentary
- Type your essay in fits, spurts, or another desultory form you like
- Revise, then revise some more
- Load Turnitin.com
- If you haven’t registered yet, register for the course
- Upload your essay before the deadline
- Print a hard copy and bring it into class
The sixth step is critical; as the syllabus says, revision is distinct from a cursory check of grammar and mechanics. You must obviously edit, too, but when we speak of revising, we are talking about everything, from grammar to your central thesis. You should also return again and again to your writing, especially when you are given the time to do so. Create a cycle in which you reflect and then revise again and again until you run out of time; don’t just hammer out something that sort of looks like an essay, hit print, and then high-five yourself. I’m not sure you can high-five yourself. That’s just clapping.
Accumulated notes on reflective and metacognitive writing, plus a few examples from former students, follow.
A note on metacognition
While we often use them this way, the words metacognition and reflection are not exactly interchangeable. A quick trip to Wikipedia (although she is a capricious fount of knowledge) reveals a bit more about the differences, viz.
- that metacognition is thinking about thinking, while
- self-reflection is a more general (and somewhat existential) kind of introspection.
You will engage in metacognition and reflection after almost every writing assignment in this course. We might even say that reflection is the first step toward metacognition, and that you are asked to take that step over and over again. The reason is simple: You become better readers, writers, and thinkers when you understand how you read, write, and think; and to inculcate that reflex takes significant time in and out of class.
I will continue to hyperlink particular terms, by the way, because we will, at some point, gambol through an updated version of this mini-unit on language, and I have my own collection of best-loved words, among them inculcate and capricious and, more recently, desultory and deleterious.
Whatever we call the processes, you are reading your own work, thinking about it, and then writing. The problem: You (the collective, general, historical you) don’t always write in a way that helps.
The efficacy of reflection
For the purpose of this post, we are going to restrict the application of metacognition and reflection to those exercises that produce a revision. These ideas apply to all English work, however, and the absence of a formal revision does not preclude good practice. With that said, a good reflection sets up the revision in such a way that a capable stranger could read the reflection and have an adequate understanding of the prompt, the original draft, and what has been changed in any revision. It is both a key and a blueprint. A bad reflection leaves your revision murky. You assign the detective work to your teacher, instead of shining a light on exactly what has been improved. You write this:
After reading it over, I noticed that it was a little rough around the edges and could easily be improved quite a bit. Another factor of my essay that should be touched upon as well would be my overall incorporation of the documents into my essential question. My analysis of the documents themselves was weak, and I found that I didn’t use them to my full advantage to help prove my argument. (Total length of reflection: ≈200 words)
Or this:
I thought my essay was great, and I handed it in disappointed in my score as has been the routine in this class. When I went back into my essay for revision, I didn’t really change anything major, but I edited a number of errors I found in the grammatical bowels of the language, and changed some words and phrases here and there that I thought were lost in meaning. (Total length of reflection: ≈300 words)
When you should be writing this:
The first error to correct was the reference to “bumps in the road”. From this reference I immediately jumped into a scenario with a zombie apocalypse, making the connection weak and illogical to the reader. So, I reworded the third sentence and then added in another sentence to build the degree of trouble from a small obstacle to total destruction. Also, I added in another sentence after introducing the idea of a zombie apocalypse to better preface the Braunbeck quote. Finally, I fixed the penultimate sentence in the first paragraph in order to clarify my ideas. (Total length of reflection: ≈1500 words)
Or this:
I decided to revisit the topic of appearance-changing technology that I touched upon in the introduction, and have the new paragraph focus on how appearance is important in society, sometimes more so than the mind is. This may seem silly, but I wanted to hear other’s ideas so I asked my essential question at dinner to see what my family thought. My mom instantly brought up appearance and my dad said that recent presidents have been consistently taller than their competitive candidates during their elections. I gathered that I was on the right track as my ideas matched up with others, and also decided to research the pattern my dad had discussed. Then the question came up as to if I should cite statistical information that I find on the internet. Should I? (Total length of reflection: ≈900 words)
The weaker examples could be about any paper and any prompt. They require your teacher to dig up the original draft, to re-grade it, and then to compare each sentence to the equivalent sentence in the revision. This is counterproductive at both ends. And, to get right to it, it is unacceptable. If you do not write a reflection according to the guidelines you’ve been given—i.e., a reflection that is both key and blueprint—your revision will not be scored.
Understand that this is not arbitrary. When you reflect meaningfully and repeatedly as you revise, your writing improves. It is that simple. You might improve from a 74 to a 78, and you might improve from an 84 to a 96—but you will improve. And you will not improve much, nor will that small improvement come easily, without an earnest and invested reflection.
When you don’t have an explicit revision, by the way, the improvement will be seen in the next assignment of that type; and if you can’t identify those patterns, realize that everything in here comes down to three things: reading, thinking, and communicating. Every reflection and act of metacognition improves you in one of those three areas, which, I hasten to add, extend far beyond high school classrooms and 39-minute sessions.