Perl and Sommers - Cross Talk

Sondra Perl’s article The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers outlines the study she did on unskilled college writers. Though I am not clear on her definition of “unskilled”, I understand the study to be of those students who have typically been classified into remedial-type classes. Perl outlined the three goals of this study were to answer how unskilled writers write, if their writing process can be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner, and “what does an increased understanding of their processes suggest about the nature of composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in schools?”
According to Perl, the study was designed with the teachers in mind as the audience for each writing exercise. This was interesting to me because in my experience teachers usually want students to write to peers or someone other than the teacher. In the results of the study, Perl said all of the students displayed a consistent composing process, which was interesting to the researchers because they assumed the process was arbitrary since the writing often seems arbitrary. Perl says for many students “writing led to planning which led to clarifying which led to more writing”. The process involved editing through out instead of writing and then editing.
This study implies that instead of teachers spending so much of their time going over rules for writing, “teachers may need to identify which characteristic components of each student’s process facilitate writing and which inhibit it before further teaching takes place.” Otherwise, teachers may be defeated. These implications make sense to me. I think teachers should spend more time listening and learning where students are getting caught-up in their writing process than focusing on the details of editing. While these are important details, if teachers focus on the prewriting aspects more and the writing aspects and then go over the editing once the students have had an opportunity to actually write, it would be much more effective.
Similarly to Perl, Nancy Sommers also studied the writing process of student (unskilled) writers. Sommers, however, focused on the revision process and compared the students to experienced writers in her article Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. One notable difference she found was that students tend to hold a negative connotation when it comes to revision. They refer to revision and editing as “scratch out and do over again,” “reviewing,” “redoing,” “marking out,” and “slashing and throwing out”. According to Sommers, students usually understand the revision process as a “rewording activity.” For experienced writers, the process is more focused on “finding the form or shape of their argument.” These writers become more concerned with the development and structure of their writing in the revision process than vocabulary, which the students are more concerned with.
Through her study, Sommers comes to the conclusion “students need to seek the dissonance of discover, utilizing in their own writing, as the experienced writers do, the very difference between writing and speech – the possibility of revision.” In short, she believes students can become better writers when they begin to see their writing in a different way. That writing is a discovery process