The Fruits of Our Labors
Notes on editing, revision, and fatal flying guillotines.
Most writing is a living thing until publication, at which point it enters a kind of stasis. Essays are updated, books get new additions, but most writing doesn’t really change after the deadline passes.
You’re learning to write, however, and that bends the rules a bit. The expectations are different: Your writing should be changed when necessary, especially as you learn more about your own style. It should stay a living, breathing document.
Medium.com lets us treat your published work as a more mutable artifact. Once your essay is online, it can spark a conversation and serve as the focus of metacognition and reflection — but it can also be edited and revised.
The instructional writing done for this course is another example of this. As part of a focus on emulation-through-analysis, I put most of my instruction and feedback into words — many, many words, delivered through several platforms. It is meant to be processed through the proxy feedback of our subreddit and linked to the pillars of grade abatement.
But this teacher-generated work is also a living, breathing thing (well, wheezing, at least). We can use some of it as an example of the distinction between editing and revision — and the pitfalls of each.
Grimoires and Grammaticasters
Putting tens of thousands of words to the digital page inevitably leads to errors. The simplest changes, therefore, are superficial edits. In fact, I’m genuinely surprised I don’t make more errors in grammar and mechanics, and I’m always glad when students point out my mistakes. It demonstrates close reading and SWE awareness. It’s also a chance for me to remove the stigma from screwing up — we’re all prone to it, and there isn’t a guillotine waiting to drop if you use the wrong “their.”
You need to learn Standard Written English. But it’s all about context and control — a dropped word or misspelling in an essay isn’t a mortal wound, but a lack of errors is impressive. If you can write without making elementary mistakes, that accomplishment won’t go unnoticed.
You must also recognize the special standards of any test of your skill, like the SAT or the AP exam. Even in here, the goal of your writing is to explore your thinking and demonstrate what you’ve learned. It’s not a double standard, and I hope you’ll correct me when I make mistakes; as a student, however, you must be more vigilant about your writing than even the best published authors.
At any rate, here’s an example of how the editing process should work. After I published some feedback a while back, a few students noticed errors. Here’s one of them writing to me:
Sorry to bother you but on the Rare Exports: State and Church medium post there is a link to Church’s editorial but when I clicked on it, it said “Search not found.”
Also in the medium post. PSO1 SWOT Analysis under the break down of our analysis when it came to cogency, amenability, metacognition, etc, I think you might have forgotten a word (a verb I believe?). Under metacognition you wrote, “I this score is fair…” I was thinking that you meant to say something along the lines of “I think this” but I didn’t want to assume anything!
Sorry for the trouble, I hope I didn’t sound rude!
If anything, this sort of email is too polite. You don’t need to apologize for helping me edit my writing. Ours is a collaborative course, and that relationship is reciprocal.
Respect and kindness are always welcome, though, and this is probably how you should approach any peer editing: with the same collegiality and compassion you should always have.
Another reason to practice empathy: No one likes a pedant, and grammatical errors are low-hanging fruit for people who want to feel superior. You shouldn’t berate yourselves or each other for making them, even as we talk about the importance of mastering SWE. To stick with arboreal metaphors, grammaticasting is the surest way to miss the forest for the trees.
If you want to practice grammar, I suggest using Free Rice. You’ll support a good cause while gamifying your inner grammarian. You can also use the site to boost your vocabulary — just be sure to start around level 30, if you do that. The highest levels are awash in obscure, relatively useless words (rheology and fleam don’t really fit into conversation), but you should find many of the ones northward of 30 to be useful in writing and on the SAT.
The Pareto/Sturgeon Corollary
Superficial grammar and mechanics should become an editing reflex as quickly as possible. As you collaborate — as you work on each other’s essays — you should make those corrections without explicit instructions.
Revision work is harder. Fixing grammar is a bit like pruning branches; it keeps things looking proper, but it doesn’t fix the landscape. Revision sometimes involves clearing whole groves. You must look to the crux or basis of an argument and see how it is supported by the arrangement of detail and the deliberate use of style and rhetoric. These elements of writing change less easily than grammar or mechanics, but they do change.
I’ll use another example from some of the writing used as feedback in this course. The Medium essay Rare Exports: State and Church has a different title from its first publication: Church and States. The original pun seemed obtuse and forced when I went back to it. There’s just too much happening: the allusion to an atypical Christmas movie is one thing, the pun on the separation of church and state , the states of being that Church explores. It’s clumsy.
The title — and the approach it helps create — is one thing. Deeper changes happen on a second or third read-through. It may seem odd that you should go back and read your essays a few times after you publish, sometimes many days or weeks later, but it’s necessary: With fresh eyes, you’ll catch more superficial errors and see what DAMAGES work can be revised.
Consider some of the feedback that was originally found in your polysyllogistic SWOT Analysis. You were given an 8 for Amenability, and I wrote that it was “impressive and really, really encouraging.” Then I added, “Maybe I’m comparing you to last year too much — we were plagued by a group of incorrigible students, really steeped in Dunning-Kruger delusions and disrespect in equal measure. They were rough.”
The reference to last year is unnecessary. It’s true, but it’s also irrelevant to your success this year. What you see there is my own half-forgotten frustration leaking through — and that frustration has no place here. It’s a detail that distracts from the purpose of all that feedback.
What I might have done is to explore the concept of group dynamics, which connects directly to our interpersonal dynamics work and to our overall focus on empathy, collaboration, and growth. I could have gone back to this quotation from Malcolm Gladwell:
[I]t’s almost impossible to know where the person ends and their environment begins, and the longer someone is in a particular environment the blurrier that line gets. More specifically, you can’t make definitive judgments about the personal characteristics of people who come from structured environments. What does it mean to say that a Marine is brave? It might mean that a Marine is an inherently brave person. It may also be that the culture of the Marine Corps is so powerful, and the training so intensive, and the supporting pressure of other Marines so empowering, that even a coward would behave bravely in that context… I’m working in a such a supportive and structured environment that I no longer know where my own abilities end and where the beneficial effects of the environment begin.
In the best environment, individual success is inexorably linked to group success. That is the lesson of Ken Robinson’s speech and our opening-day lessons: When you are cut off from the environment, when you are driven by the atomizing selfishness of traditional learning, you suffer. You paradoxically lose individual success the more you focus on it, despite whatever short-term gains you experience.
What makes schooling unique is that it only takes a few individuals to corrupt an otherwise supportive environment. The environment can almost never compensate for that impact, because it is an ameliorative environment — the “no child left behind” kind of logic that cannot and will not ignore individuals, no matter how toxic they are.
Last year, there were almost 90 AP students, by far the most ever enrolled in any AP English class in the history of Brewster High School. Many of those students were wonderful. Some were apathetic or disengaged. And some were delusional and disruptive, especially when asked to self-assess.
Think of it as a bell curve:
That’s taken from the GAP Basics guide — which, by the way, has had a typo in it that I can’t seem to find the time to fix: “Students earning a 5- struggle to fi;nd success.” The semicolon is nowhere near any of those letters on a keyboard, so I feel as if it teleported in from elsewhere on the page. Semicolons are pernicious beasts.
Anyway, I taught some of the best students I’ve ever had last year, a group of exceptional talents who learned more amenability and collegiality in one year than I have any right to expect. That’s the high taper of the curve, and there were at least 20 students in that quadrant.
Unfortunately, the high taper often has a low counterpoint, especially when enrollment is that large. Last year was no exception. In Q4, students earned GAP scores of 2, 3, and 4. In your Q1, no one earned even a 5-.
You’re familiar with grade abatement by now. You know how difficult it is to earn a profile of 5- or lower. And that’s before we consider students whose arrogance or hostility was offset by intelligence — students who might earn a higher profile through sheer skill and performance, yet harbor ever greater Dunning-Kruger delusions. Disrespect and academic success aren’t mutually exclusive, after all.
The point is that group dynamics are complex and sometimes fragile things. If even 10% of the class evinces contempt and arrogance and disdain, the learning environment suffers. From a teacher’s perspective, it suggests a corollary to two ideas we’ve discussed before: Sturgeon’s law and the Pareto principle. It can be put into a syllogism:
- 20% of a class is in the high taper of grade abatement.
- Less than 10% of the class is in the low taper of grade abatement.
- ∴The class environment thrives to produce group and individual success.
You have to hit that 20/10 split for the class to work. If there are 25 students in a class, you can survive one or two low-taper GAPs as long as you have five or more high-taper GAPs. If either statistic moves past the threshold, the overall dynamic begins to break down.
In two separate class periods last year, the split was actually 30/30: 5–7 high-taper students and 5–7 low-taper students. That’s a virtual stalemate — enough to grind real collaborative learning to a halt.
As our year continues, you’ll read some of the grade abatement profiles written by the low-taper kids, just as you’ll read some of the grade abatement profiles written by the high-taper ones. And if you can learn from their strengths and weaknesses, that will have been worth mentioning. If it helps you to keep your group dynamic healthy and whole, it will have been worth mentioning.
But that’s not what I did. I threw in a reference to last year’s group without qualifying it, and that’s not good argumentation. At best, it’s superfluous; at worst, it draws moths to the flame like so many confused kamikaze pilots. Good revision work would have caught that.
Barrel Rolls
I’d like to be transparent with you: All this discussion of revision is as much about revising how we learn as it is about revising how we write. Both require diligence, patience, and an open mind, and you are receiving many GAP-related essays from me today.
For my part, I hope to avoid the failure from last year. It’s a shared failure, because my students are old enough to have agency; you’re no longer children, after all. If you resist negative feedback and hang doggedly onto delusional and illusory superiority, that’s on you. If you poison the well from which we all drink, that’s on you.
But I still failed to break through and reach those low-taper students. Quixotic or not, I think that’s on me. I do not want any student to live a life built on self-deception and the Dunning-Kruger effect. That catches up to all of us in the end, and the world is made worse by hypocrisy and arrogance. I do not want any student to be a slave to grades, either, and the twisted self-image they support. No one should associate self-worth so myopically with a number.
In my most earnest moments, I want to help students see their true abilities and potential — the unique strengths that can be honed and the unique weaknesses that can be turned, over time, into strengths.
To get back to the opening of this post, the first teachable moment is that all writing needs to be done carefully, even if it must be done quickly. When we make mistakes, we need the kindness and support of our collaborative circle to fix them.
The second teachable moment is this: I will give you accurate feedback, and if it seems harsh, let’s talk about that feeling. It’s not just that there is, as always, a point after which your opinion of yourself shades off into an error of fact; it’s that you have to master those ineluctable feelings of frustration in order to think logically about your next step.
Soon enough, we will study logical fallacies and cognitive failures — how your brain doesn’t quite work the way you hope it would. Part of that is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and part of fighting the DK effect is eliminating your own logical fallacies. The best way to do that is to work together.
