First-Year Writing Seminar: Re-Visionaries: Creative Work and the Second Look

Catalog description

All writing benefits from revision, and the writer of perfect first-drafts is a myth. Many young writers have heard these ideas before. But student writers often associate the idea of revising their own work with dread, hurry, communication-policing, or just confusion: how to start? On the other hand, experienced writers know that revision is entirely positive, almost magical: it can yield a new text that is not necessarily better, by some objective scale, but so startlingly true to the writer's voice and essence that the writer can wonder where it came from. Above all, revision returns the work to the writer itself, where it always belonged. This is a first-year writing seminar in which we practice and study revision, not just as a strategy but as an ethos. We will write and revise, sometimes multiple times, our own essays (and help edit our classmates' writing in workshops); we will consider punctuation, vocabulary sentences, paragraphing, and structure. We will also read, watch, and listen to creative works in writing, music, film and visual art which embody the idea of revision, and which help the student writer understand that they are fully in control of the gift they are giving the reader—because only they know what the gift is supposed to be.