Landing : Athabascau University

An Elbow’s approaches to revision

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By MARC ROGER DICKNER in the group :: MAIS Blog :: October 20, 2019 - 10:53pm

After reading Elbow’s approaches to revision in his book Writing With Power, I found it to be most useful as it guided my revision with basic but to the point rhetorical questions.  The criterion-based approach was very useful in my personal revision as I am able to follow a prescription like list to ensure all my ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s crossed so to say. Additionally, it aligns with the course’s grading rubric so that I can self-evaluate my work based on the assessments that will be used to grade my paper.  

The reader-based approach was the way to go when it came to peers reviewing my work. Although it is nice to have someone indicate my grammatical errors that I overlooked or to have tips provided regarding omitting words for conciseness. It is much more useful to have the feedback of the reader’s thoughts to see how my words and ideas were received. Very valuable to understand if the reader was confused or did not get the reaction that I predicted they would. Whether they were confused or couldn't follow my train of thought.

Feedback is necessary; not always good to you but most certainly necessary for learning to occur.