Voices in Student Editing/ Revising

This paper was pretty daunting. So I started with exigence. I wanted to know who has said what and where I fit in. So I jotted down a few names I came across, whether they had written multiple essays on the topic or if they had been mentioned in other sources I have read.

These voices include some of the ones discussed in class already! So that’s a win! These voices include:

Carol Berkenkotter

Nancy Sommers

Donald M. Murray

There are also voices that we have not discussed in class but seem to also have knowledge and ethos on the topic. These voices include:

Lester Fairley

Toby Fulwieler

Joseph Harris

John Rieff

My exigence I will be responding to and therefore narrowing my focus on is in response to Carol Berkenkotter’s essay “Student Writers and Their Sense of Authority over Texts”. At the end of this essay she does not make a claim for anything besides that peer reviews may not be as wonderful as presented. I also found that Murray and Sommers really push for these peer reviews so that is interesting as well. I will mainly be working with this Berkenkotter piece as well as more modern pieces to bolster my own argument. My argument will be based on answering the questions Berkenkotter arises and then discussing my findings against the other voices discussed above. This paper will mainly focus on student revision and editing especially in regards to gaining authority over a student’s work.