‘The Most Peaceful I Ever Felt Writing’: A Contemplative Approach to Essay Revision

Abstract

R evision is central to writing.Yet it remains a persistently challenging process to teach.Particularly in first-year writing courses, students often see revision as tedious, onerous, or even overwhelming.Final drafts do not therefore always reflect "deep revision" but oftentimes "surface editing" instead (Breidenbach 202).This is not especially surprising.In our hyper-digital world of constant distraction, it can be difficult enough summoning the motivation to begin revision-let alone cultivating the type of focused attention and patient re-seeing required for doing it well.This essay proposes that contemplative practices including yoga, freewriting, and meditation can not only enhance student motivation to revise, but more important, foster specific habits of mind beneficial to revision. 1 Today in higher education, contemplative pedagogy is blossoming across an array of disciplines.Affording benefits such as sharpened focus, stress reduction, and newfound insight, contemplative practices encourage students to pay close attention and "live fully into the content at hand" (Gunnlaugson et al. 1-2; Barbezat and Bush 206).This pedagogy provides a valuable frame of mind for conducting acts of revision.To begin to explore the links between contemplative practices and revision, I share a qualitative analysis of student writing and oral reflections from two First-Year English classes 2 to 1. My own contemplative practices include regular Vinyasa yoga and (more recently) meditation.I presented a poster session of this project at the 2015 Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education Conference.2. I draw from one composition course and one literature-based writing course-both required components of the First-Year sequence at my university.Although my data derives from two different courses, I focus on students' revision of the same type of assignment: rhetorical analysis.The literature-based writing class conducted a rhetorical analysis of a nineteenth-century woman's rights text.In this course, I assigned both literary and rhetorical analyses.The composition class conducted a rhetorical analysis of a recent op-ed and an intertextual rhetorical analysis of a written and audio-visual text.