Carol Berkenkotter’s naturalistic process study of experienced writer Donald M. Murray, in her article “Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer,” provides two important insights about revision, with implications to also be considered for my (and our) own process. First being what an integral role planning plays in the activity of revision in writing, and second being how much planning and revision seen in the experienced writer (Murray) is shaped by the consideration of the audience.
I had long viewed the planning activity in writing to be mostly part of its initial formulation, as the writing process has been continually segmented and explained in terms of successive steps of pre-writing (or planning), writing, revising, and editing, throughout my academic journey up to this point. However, these activities are intertwined, and the experienced writer jumps back and forth between these entangled tasks. To examine the history of Murray’s drafts and evaluate his text, notes, and tape recordings, Berkenkotter created code categories for the activities in his writing process: planning, evaluating, revising, and editing. She and an independent coder then attempted to measure and follow coded activity within his process. They found they were largely double coding for revising and planning activities, suggesting that the activities are conjoined. And Berkenkotter stated that when Murray saw major revisions were needed, “he collapsed planning and revising” into the activity she calls “reconceiving”. According to Berkenkotter, the activity of reconceiving, which entails scanning one’s text from the point of view of an outside reader and to continue to redraft until rhetorical and other concerns are settled, shows how decisions and revision shape planning, as concepts are being reconceived by the writer. Interestingly, planning appeared to be the most prevalent activity of the experienced writer’s process, and existed within other activities, as seen when concepts were evaluated and reconceived.
In studying the experienced writer of Donald M. Murray, we can see how the consideration of the audience played an important role in his planning and his revising activities. For his articles and longer texts, Murray utilizes peer-reviewers to look over his work. Berkenkotter observed that much of his planning activity for a particular article grew from the commentary of his readers and their responses to his initial drafts. Murray incorporated his summary of their input directly onto his draft, which led him to new planning and revision activities. Additionally, when tasked to write about an unfamiliar topic, and moreover to write for an unfamiliar audience of 10 to 12-year-olds, we see the difficulty Murray had in formulating and structuring a text and its language for the lab-created scenario by Berkenkotter. When he struggled to imagine (to him) an out of reach reader, he struggled to produce text.
In class when we undergo peer review and receive a rubric as a lens to review others and our own work, I see how much feedback from others dictates how I move forward with my drafts. Even more so, I’ve noticed how the feedback I end up giving others opens a dialogue for my own text. I heavily apply the rubric to my paper to assess how successfully I am achieving the goals of an essay and it is often my summarization of others’ comments (and my own commentary added in consideration of my new checklist) that lead me to go back to my essay, to revise and re-conceptualize. Audience consideration is clearly critical to both planning and revision, as well as the other recursive activities of writing, such as stylistic editing, etc. So, the question becomes, how can we keep a reader in mind when we don’t have a peer reviewer or checklist or rubric to view and frame our work around? Like the experienced writer Murray, we must ask ourselves (even if aloud too) if we are meeting rhetorical goals as we plan and revise, and whether our word choice and text is shaped so that it accomplishes the tasks it requires for our imagined reader. We must keep pulling in that imagined, external reader until they become as intrinsic to our writing as they are to Murray’s.
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