College English
342 articlesOctober 1991
September 1991
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Abstract
Preview this article: Reputation, Canon-Formation, Pedagogy: George Orwell in the Classroom, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/53/5/collegeenglish9561-1.gif
April 1991
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It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship. I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources. To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical sys-
March 1991
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Abstract
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February 1991
November 1990
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Pretext, Context, Subtext: Textual Power in the Writing of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Martin Luther King, Jr. ↗
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In recent years, as poststructuralist criticism has achieved a certain amount of acceptance and even dominance in some English departments, many scholars who are interested in bridging the gap between what they believe and publish professionally and what they teach have begun to construct pedagogical systems in which the analysis of texts, various entities that may fall within or without the customarily prescribed canon of literature, is the focus of study. Robert Scholes, in Textual Power, the third book in his critical trilogy, advocates bridging the gap between professional/critical stances and pedagogical practices, especially for those critics who espouse structural, semiotic, and poststructuralist practices. Scholes asserts that teachers of English have an obligation to teach their students about textuality: how texts function (both on a synchronic and diachronic level), how texts can be read (often in different ways and with different results), what informs texts (pretextual, contextual, and subtextual meaning always already inscribed in the text), how texts become part of readers' consciousness and spawn new texts (reading, interpreting, and critiquing), and how so much of what we refer to as culture (especially in a postmodern economy that is informationrather than industrial-based) is textual. Many authors, both directly and indirectly, have discussed the change from an industrial-based economy to an information-based economy as one of the characteristics of a postmodern era (see Huyssen; Jameson; Lyotard; Rowe). Reading (encountering a text), interpreting (creating a companion text), and critiquing (generating a dialectic or dialogic text) are essential acts for students as readers of literature, for students as writers, as well as for students as individuals. Scholes concisely summarizes the teacher's role in this process:
October 1990
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April 1990
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In just about half of a colleague's teaching evaluations (twelve of twenty-six evaluations) from two first-year composition and introduction to literature sections, she read objections to her feminist stance, especially her discussions of feminism and pedagogy. Most of the objections came from students who insisted that the classroom ought to be an ideologically neutral space free from the instructor's interests and concerns. The following samples, copied verbatim, suggest the drift of the students' complaints:
March 1990
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November 1989
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Preview this article: Literacy and Genre: Towards a Pedagogy of Mediation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/51/7/collegeenglish11269-1.gif
October 1989
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November 1988
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September 1988
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April 1988
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In the new world of writing across the curriculum, English departments are still trying to find their role. They have been in charge of writing instruction for so long that they often feel that they should institute, or at least lead, writingacross-the-curriculum programs. But I want to argue that the English department should have no special role in writing across the curriculum-no unique leadership role and no exclusive classes to teach-not even freshman composition. Instead, a writing-across-the-curriculum program should be designed, administered, and taught equally by all departments. True writing across the curriculum should be based on dialogue among all the departments, and, in this dialogue, the English department should be only one of the voices.
March 1988
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In a challenging essay on Emerson as an essayist, William Gass complains about all the his colleagues are writing, those awful objects full of footnotes and scholarly defenses. He wishes that more of us would turn to writing again-informal, experimental, open-ended, personal pieces, like Emerson's (25). No one would dispute, I think, that the article in Gass' sense dominates the scholarly journals. To get something published anymore we need to pretend that everything is clear, that our arguments are unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit inferences, no illegitimate connections (Gass 25), and that means submitting articles rather than essays. Why is that? Why has the essay as a form declined in the academic world, even as has gained in popularity outside the academic world? As Joseph Epstein has recently said in his own essay about the essay, it is a sweet time to be an essayist; the essay is taking up the slack for the novel (411). Why is that true outside of academe when the opposite is the case inside? Chesterton gives us one perspective on these questions in the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, a book, like all of Chesterton's books, which is nothing more than a long, associative set of essays. Chesterton is a quintessential essayist, quick to write and generalize, informal yet detached, always playing over the field of his own immediate experience and reading. In these opening paragraphs of the autobiography, he quickly claims the ground that I think all essays claim when he admits that he has no first-hand knowledge of his own birth and the circumstances of his early childhood and so must accept on faith the evidence of his existence: Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of Higher Criticism. It is possible, by employing the skeptical methods of contemporary philosophy and criticism, to argue that he was never born at all. He cannot prove that he was. But I prefer Chris Anderson is assistant professor of English and Composition Coordinator at Oregon State University. His book, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, was published last year by Southern Illinois University Press, and he has edited and contributed to another book for Southern Illinois, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, to be published this fall.
December 1987
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Most Freshman English programs conceive of themselves as providing some form of introduction to university level discourse. The expectation is that students will leave English I (or whatever its designation) with the requisite reading and writing skills to enter a new discourse community, the world of the academy. Just what that means, however, is invariably in contention. Even within our own discipline, the acts of reading and writing have become the subject of much controversy. A recent review in College English gives some indication of one of the current divisions within the profession about exactly what we teach people when we teach them to read: Despite the recent wrangle and heated debates among the various camps of literary criticism, there are quite a few of us-most,
November 1987
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Preview this article: The Subject of Pedagogy: Lessons in Psychoanalysis and Politics, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/49/7/collegeenglish11449-1.gif
October 1987
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I hadn't realized I was so ignorant, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know. Nettie, The Color Purple The central tasks of pedagogy are, and have always been, to teach others how to teach themselves and to instill the desire to know. The difficulty of teaching lies in the resistance of both student and teacher to the truth underlying the pedagogical act. Resistance is a commonly-used term in both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. It could be argued that, within either discipline, theory encounters practice as a kind of resistance; or that in relation to a psychoanalytic theory of teaching, pedagogy as practice assumes some autonomy in resisting the theory on which it is founded. Unlike traditional pedagogy, however, psychoanalysis can claim a coherent relation between theory and practice as part of its self-definition: everything that psychoanalysis teaches derives from the dynamics of a particular drama, that unfolding between the and the analysand. Crucial to this drama is the education of the analyst, which itself hinges on an analysis that teaches theory through practice. Freud believed that no amount of theoretical instruction could convince his students of the truth of psychoanalysis even where there was a strong wish to be convinced. Consequently, he required that everyone who wishes to treat others by analysis should first undergo an analysis himself. Only in the course of this 'self-analysis' [by which Freud means 'training analysis'] . . . , when he actually experiences in his own person, or rather in his own psyche, the processes asserted by analysis to take place, does he acquire the convictions by which he will later be guided as an analyst (Question 39). The truth of psychoanalytic theory can be grasped only through the subjective experience of psychoanalysis. But this truth has less to do with the verification Patrick McGee is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Recently, he has published articles on William Faulkner, James Joyce, and contemporary criticism. He has a book forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 1988 entitled Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's Ulysses.
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More Comments on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay" ↗
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Pedro Beade, Paula Beck, David Foster, More Comments on "Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay", College English, Vol. 49, No. 6, Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy I (Oct., 1987), pp. 707-711
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The theory that reading is composing-an open-ended, investigative, and active process-is hardly new. Over the past few years, writing teachers have turned their attention to reading and extended the useful term to describe not only the recursive movement among the pre-writing, drafting, and revising stages of writing, but also the construction of meaning through reading. The theories they have drawn on range from the work of reading researchers like Harry Singer, Frank Smith, and Charles Cooper and Anthony Petrosky to critical theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt and Roland Barthes.' While it is difficult to generalize about such wide-ranging work, a quick review of the literature of constructive reading shows agreement on one point: the power of conventions, or schemata, to shape our understanding of a text. But the language for naming this phenomenon is divergent. Reading researchers describe the process of composing meaning in apparently neutral terms-comprehending, reading for meaning, learning from text-and some separate a literal from an interpretive level of reading,2 using Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy (89-90), influential since the 1950s. Critical theorists, on the other hand, show that all composed meanings are interpretations; this is the view we want to illustrate as we describe, theoretically and practically, a sequence of writing assignments used to encourage interpretation in our introductory composition classes. In our view, the same questions asked by critical theory-what is reading, what is the status of a text, how do we clarify approaches to interpretation-are questions to be asked by composition teachers, whose job is to teach students how to compose readings of texts, literary and non-literary, written and nonwritten. With this aim in mind, we agreed to define interpretation as a process of both reading and writing. We discarded conventional injunctions to look at the words, as if simply gazing at words on the page would force them into meaning. We insisted instead that good readers must understand the assumptions that determine what they see, that good writers do not wait for meaning to take
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Why is it that students seem to improve their texts so often, and desire to improve them more, when they're given nondirective feedback? Why do teacherless writing groups (where the writer gets conflicting responses from readers instead of teacherly direction) lead to more writing? How can Donald Murray (Writer 173) claim to get effective revision from writers in conferences lasting only five minutes? Stereotype of a Donald Murray conference:
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This special double issue of College English in some ways illustrates what its essays are about, possibly the resistance, as Freud said about analysis, against the uncovering of resistances (Analysis 239). This first issue begins where a Freudian approach to pedagogy necessarily starts, with the Freudian concept of resistance-four essays, by Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl, Patrick McGee, and Robert Brooke, dealing with blockages theoretical and practical to reading and to teaching. The second issue, with essays by Gregory Ulmer, Gregory Jay, and Ronald Schleifer, moves beyond to explore Freud's concept of the as it bears on the role of the teacher (the subject who is supposed to know), the student, learning, teaching, reading, and so on. The essays of both issues argue that the to reading and teaching is also the force that makes them possibleparticularly that reading and teaching must in an important sense fail before they succeed. This claim arises in relation to Freud's discussion of the to therapy and Paul de Man's resistance to and from specific comparisons of the classroom and the therapy session. The course of these essays will move from (1) a consideration of and its place in a Freudian approach to pedagogy, (2) to a theory of the subject for a Freudian account of student/teacher interaction, and (3) to a theory of Freudian discourse as a communication model. All of these essays, but especially those in the second issue, then move toward another consideration-the ideological critique of what teachers teach and how they teach it. These special issues of College English also illustrate the they are talking about in that a few contributors bowed out early-schedules busier than
September 1987
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Abstract
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February 1987
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The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.
January 1987
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December 1986
January 1986
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Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,
November 1985
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October 1985
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Degree of Difficulty in Basic Writing Courses: Insights from the Oral Proficiency Interview Testing Program ↗
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April 1985
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Preview this article: The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/47/4/collegeenglish13275-1.gif
January 1985
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Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).
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November 1984
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eighth or ninth on a list of ten items. Last year it appeared again, first on the list. Teachers of literature have also begun to talk about collaborative learning, although not always by that name. It is viewed as a way of engaging students more deeply with the text and also as an aspect of professors' engagement with the professional community. At its 1978 convention the Modern Language Association scheduled a multi-session forum entitled Presence, and Authority in the Teaching of Literature. One of the associated sessions, called Negotiations of Literary Knowledge, included a discussion of the authority and structure (including the collaborative classroom structure) of communities. At the 1983 MLA convention collaborative practices in reestablishing authority and value in literary studies were examined under such rubrics as Talking to the Academic Community: Conferences as Institutions and How Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost Got to be Valuable (changes in interpretive attitudes in the community of Miltonists). In both these contexts collaborative learning is discussed sometimes as a process that constitutes fields or disciplines of study and sometimes as a pedagogical tool that works in teaching composition and literature. The former discussion, often highly theoretical, usually manages to keep at bay the more
September 1984
April 1984
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Like thousands of other composition techers in America, I teach in a writing program that uses an anthology of nonfiction prose. Moreover, like a great many such teachers I enjoy reading and teaching nonfiction prose, and I believe that, by learning to read and analyze such prose critically, students can improve their own writing and, incidentally, their reading too. Still, I am aware that the use of nonfiction in a composition course is not automatically a good; the decisive factor is what teachers have students do with the prose and how they have them do it. Over the past several years I have also become increasingly aware that teachers are pretty much on their own when it comes to analyzing and evaluating nonfiction prose, especially the twentieth-century English nonfiction that comprises the bulk of most composition anthologies. In this article I want, first, to call attention to the paucity of rhetorical and stylistic criticism of twentieth-century English nonfiction and to offer some explanations for this phenomenon; second, to show why this lack of criticism concerns me and should concern other writing teachers; and third, to offer some proposals to remedy the situation.
March 1984
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January 1984
October 1983
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As those of us who are over twenty-five and teach writing know, revision pedagogy has changed since the days when we were in school. Thanks to the research of Donald Murray, Nancy Sommers, Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, to name just a few, teachers no longer present revision simply as the mop-up operation that students must endure for not getting it right the first time. It is now rather conceived as a complex creative act that everyone must master, if, like the professionals, one wants to write really well. Yet in our newly-found enthusiasm for revision, we must deal with a few anomalies. First, although research shows that most good writers revise more extensively than poor writers, some revise little and still produce fine texts. Journalists, for example, frequently produce lucid first-draft articles, and even novelists occasionally write whole books with only minor revision. James Dickey may assume that the first fifty ways I try it are going to be wrong, but Zora Neale Hurston says she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, a 286-page novel, in seven weeks with few changes.' Second, there are no uniform patterns that constitute expert revision. As Faigley and Witte pointed out in their recent study (Analyzing Revision), professional writers, dealing with the same topic under similar conditions, all revised in their own way: