Scaffolding the Revision Process
By Engaging Your Students in an Interactive Learning Discussion
The purpose of this assignment is to challenge you as a writing tutor to engage your student in
1metacognitive thinking as he/she revises part or all of a piece of his/her writing.
As writing in response to a class assignment tends to be written with a specific purpose, for a particular
audience, and in response to a specific prompt, it is likely that you as the tutor and the student need to
talk to clarify these issues. What, exactly, does the instructor seem to be soliciting as a response
regarding an authorial stance (persuasive or reportorial), supporting evidence, authorial ethos
(persona/attitude), and audience responses? How will the author meet the reader’s expectations so as
to communicate authorial knowledge and perspective?
In short, how will you, the tutor, assist the writer to understand the instructor’s purpose in crafting the
prompt and expectations regarding the cognitive understanding and rhetorical strategies that the
student must demonstrate through the finished paper?
Step 1. After reading the prompt with the student, engage the student in a discussion of the general
content that should be in the paper, the student’s main claim/thesis, and the basic structure that the
paper should have.
Step 2, Reading the paper
Having now thought carefully about the assignment and the student’s communicative intentions as a
writer, prepare to read the paper.
Use two different colored highlighters, set up two sheets of paper, or devise some other way of keeping
track of successful parts of the paper and parts of the paper that would benefit from substantial
revision.
Take turns reading the paper out loud, perhaps going paragraph by paragraph. Note successful and less
successful points related to structure, relationships among ideas, use of evidence, clarity of authorial
intention, idea organization, grammar and style, etc.
Step 4. Engage in the paper reshaping/re-inventing process
Depending on the degree to which the paper does or does not satisfy the student because it does or
does not seem to meet the expectations of the assignment, engage the student in the revision process.
Begin with the most pervasive areas of reconstruction first. For example, if the paper was to be
persuasive and it is reportorial, begin with the revision of the main claim or thesis statement. If the
evidence is simply quoted or paraphrased, but not analyzed and linked to the persuasive purpose of the
writer, assist the student to begin to make his/her analysis clear.
Save the attention to the surface level revisions to the paper until the end.
Guiding the revision process with questions
Throughout the revision process, one of your aims is to enable the writer to learn to respond to his/her
own prose from a metacognitive perspective. He/she must think about and question his/her own
thinking. At first, you can take on this role. Ask questions. If you don’t understand a sentence or
paragraph, ask the writer “What do you want me, the reader, to think when I read this?” Then explain
what you did think and/or why you didn’t think what the writer thought.
A key to revision is trying to think about how a reader might understand your prose. Ask your student “
Could you understand your paper as you mean it to be understood if you had only the words on the
page but not all of the other related thoughts that you have in your head?“
Therefore, as a tutor, you want to assist your student to carefully analyze the prompt, the instructor’s
expectations, the decisions he/she as a writer makes regarding the purpose, content, organization, and
sentence-by-sentence construction of the paper, and the likelihood that the reader will interpret the
ideas as he/she, the author, intended.
After your tutoring session focused on revision and using the suggested ideas on this handout, take the
time to type a discussion of the session. Describe and analyze your student’s progress throughout the
revision discussion. What strengths as a thinker and a writer did he/she demonstrate? What seemed
most difficult for him/her? Did you see evidence of his/her metacognitive thinking as hee/she
considered the intentions of the prompt, the possible reactions of the reader, and the strengths and
areas of potential confusion in the paper from the perspective of a reader?
Bring your typed response to class to share with your peers and to submit for credit.
Assignment due date: Refer to the Course Syllabus. Try to remember to consider completing this
assignment when you have a session wherein you are assisting a student with a paper revision. Don’t
wait until the due date is near as you might not have a student engaged in the paper revision process.