Love the Sinner: Revision

I decided to “revise from scratch” the essay I wrote a long time ago about my experience “meeting” Fred Phelps. Everything about my feelings towards the Westboro Baptist Church is complicated. They are my biggest weakness, where the blackest hole in my heart lies. I wanted to take the original piece and make it a…

Crystal Magic: Revised and Developed

This week my students and I worked to revise and develop one of our papers. I chose this one to revise because when he finished reading the other version, my husband said, “I  expected more. It’s not long enough. You need to tell me more about this person.” So I did, and of course it…

Turning the Habitual Experience into a Story Worth Telling

My students have a tendency to write about habitual experiences in their lives in a very distanced and curtailed way, something like this: “When I was little, I would go down to the creek and catch crawdads.” They have a particularly hard time giving concrete and specific details about experiences that happened to them a…

Revised and Developed Paper: Calling the Ambulance

For their second Revised and Developed Papers, I asked my students to try revising from scratch, which I tried too. But as I started writing, I found it to be less useful for this particular essay, because I already knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to continue the story of “calling the…

Beyond Scratching the Surface: Revising from Scratch for Deep Transformation

As I get ready for RMMLA 2017, I found myself revisiting the paper I wrote for RMMLA 2016. It is about a revision strategy I started using with my students to help them revise deeply, rather than getting caught up on fixing surface errors. Beyond Scratching the Surface: Revising from Scratch for Deep Transformation Like…