Part 1A: Learning Outcome 1

As a student writer there are many areas I struggle with. I have a tendency to fall in love with my first drafts and only make small revisions rather than changing my paper in the drastic ways it needs to be changed. This is something that seems to be common among student writers. One experienced writer, Nancy Sommers, talks about the way students struggle with their writing in her piece called “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” In this piece she analyzes the differences between the way student writers and adult writers approach writing. Sommers starting statement suggests “Students understand the revision process as a rewording activity” this appears to be true in many instances. Rather than taking a paragraph and rethinking it completely, students tend to re-word their already stated topics to try and pass it off as revising. I am guilty of doing this, seeing that I tend to fall in love with my first drafts and don’t like to rethink entire paragraphs and change my ideas completely.

Adult writers tend to look deeper into their work than student writers do. Sommers makes the point that “The student writers constantly struggle to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers do the opposite: they seek to discover meaning in the engagement with their writing, in revision.” This is something I never put into consideration when looking at my writing, but it is something I agree with completely. Student writers approach writing in a different way than adult writers, as students we follow a topic when writing our essay and stick as closely to it as possible. Adult writers aren’t afraid to branch out and relate other ideas to their topic, something that student writers struggle with. In my essay Big Data In Healthcare I feel I branched out of the typical student mindset and found ways to look deeper into big data and its use in the medical field. I related my thoughts and claims to other ideas and got out of that structured comfort zone I had previously been stuck in. I feel that my big data essay was my best one over this course because I was able to put all my newly learned revision skills into practice.