Paula Patch
Elon University
English

I primarily teach first-year writing.  My research about writing pedagogy derives from and informs my teaching.

What Can We Learn from First-Year Writing Students' Drafting Habits?

…administrators, policy makers, parents, and students expect the [first-year writing] course to prepare students for the writing they will do later—in the university and even beyond it. Implicit in these expectations is the assumption that [FYW] should and will provide students with knowledge and skills that can transfer to writing tasks in other courses and contexts.

-- Elizabeth Wardle, “Understanding ‘Transfer’”

Rationale

If the goal of the FYW course is to strengthen student writing at the college level, it makes sense to see if the course meets this goal; one way to do so is to document the transfer of writing strategies taught in the FYW course to writing completed in other courses. In other words, let’s see if what we’re teaching “sticks,” or become tools students use to successfully navigate new writing situations.

One set of writing strategies focus on the writing process. These process strategies refer to methods students might employ at various stages of the writing process, which are generally referred to as the following: invention, planning, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. This process is recursive rather than linear, and most stages happen simultaneously as writers develop expertise.

Why drafts?

For this initial study of transfer, I focused on the drafting stage of the writing process. Drafting can be defined as the putting into sentences and paragraphs the ideas developed and information collected during the invention and planning stages of the writing process. Often, first or “rough” drafts represent initial attempts at some sort of structure, attempts that require revision (re-seeing that results in re-writing of part of all of the drafts) as writers work through and practice the diction, syntax, and structure in which those ideas and information are developed and communicated. A good “final draft” should be the revised, edited, and proofread product of at least a couple of attempts that students turn in for assessment. Because an initial draft is always an attempt, students who turn in a first attempt as a final product tend to receive lower grades and more negative feedback than students who make multiple attempts to refine their writing.

Writing teachers usually try to instill the drafting habit in students by teaching students a variety of strategies for drafting and revising and by requiring students to create and turn in multiple drafts of their writing assignments. The goal is for students to employ this drafting habit in new writing situations in other courses where they may not be required to turn in multiple drafts. 

My specific research question, then, is: When drafts are not required, do students create multiple rough drafts, as they are taught to do in the FYW class?

Limitations

The requirements for the Elon Teaching and Learning Partnership limited my methods in two (ultimately good) ways:

I did not have time to conduct a longitudinal study of students’ drafting behaviors as they progressed through their later coursework. Therefore, I decided to study transfer between courses students were enrolled in during the same semester they were enrolled in first-year writing.

I did not have time or resources to study students in FYW classes other than my own. Luckily, I taught five sections of FYW over two semesters, and had a potential sample size of about 95 students. (My initial results include information from only four of these courses).

Final Research Question

Do students transfer the strategy of creating multiple drafts from the FYW course to writing assignments in other courses taking place during the same semester?

Writing Journals

To answer my research question, I conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the content of weekly writing journals collected from students enrolled in my FYW courses. A typical practice in many FYW classes, these journals asked students to reflect on their growth as writers: the processes and strategies they used to create texts, the attitudes and habits they developed or abandoned as they learned new writing strategies, and the questions that arose as they confronted new writing situations. The writing journals allowed me to collect data in real time (i.e., in the real context of the course), and in a form that could be analyzed quickly.

I asked students a range of questions, from guided questions about their drafting habits (the answers to which form the basis of the initial results presented in this poster) to open-ended questions about students’ perceptions of what they were learning about writing in general. The latter questions allowed me to determine if my focus on drafting was, in fact, the best focus when considering transfer; that is, these questions helped me understand if, perhaps, other strategies were ultimately “stickier” or being transferred more frequently or more effortlessly.

Sample Journal Prompt

(used to acquire the initial results presented on the next page)

• In classes other than English 110 [Elon’s FYW course], for what kinds of assignments did you create one (final) draft only? Why?
• For what kinds of assignments did you create multiple drafts? How many drafts did you create?
• Were multiple drafts required?
• If multiple drafts were not required, why did you create multiple drafts of the assignments?

Did students create multiple drafts? Sometimes. It depended on the assignment

For writing assignments in classes other than first-year writing, 

• 40% created multiple drafts for some assignments and only one draft for other assignments
• 25%  of students created multiple drafts for all assignments
• 23% created only one draft—the final product—for all assignments
• 12% did not have writing assignments in other classes—and, therefore, had no opportunity to draft (or not)

Fewer than 10% of the students were required to turn in multiple drafts of writing assignments in their other classes.

Many students feel that drafting improves their writing, which leads to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.

• 38% said they created multiple drafts in order to improve their writing, in general
• 20% created multiple drafts in order to improve their writing in pursuit of a good grade on an assignment
• 14% created multiple drafts in order to incorporate feedback from professors, peers, or writing center consultants
• 14% said creating multiple drafts helped them organize their thoughts
• 14% said multiple drafts helped them clarify ideas or correct specific errors

Students create only one draft when they perceive that the writing they do for classes other than FYW is unimportant.

• 35% said they considered the assignment “easy,” “short,” “fun,” or otherwise insignificant
• 30% reported they simply did not want to put forth the extra effort 
• 22% reported that a time constraint affected their ability or willingness to create multiple drafts
• 13% felt creating multiple drafts was inappropriate for some assignments (e.g., freewriting)

Discussion

While anecdotal evidence usually points to personality flaws, such as laziness or poor time management, as the motivating factor behind students' unwillingness to draft, it’s interesting to note that perhaps getting students to draft is simply a matter of changing their perceptions about what constitutes “important” writing.

In some of their non-writing classes, a de-emphasis on composing (in contrast to an emphasis on content) may cause students to be confused about whether the assignment is important enough to spend time drafting and revising it.Transfer can happen only when students are provided the opportunity to use the strategy; for many of our students, this opportunity does not—or is perceived to not—exist. 

Understanding when and why students create multiple drafts of writing assignments can help writing professors decide how to teach not only drafting strategies, but critical thinking skills so that students can be successful in other writing contexts. The latter skills are valuable for helping students navigate two particular areas uncovered in this research:

• Understanding that all writing is “important,” and
• How to make sense of what they are learning in FYW when they don’t have an opportunity to practice it in other courses.

A Note about Drafts

Do student always need to create multiple drafts? Not necessarily. In fact, experienced writers often don’t create multiple drafts of informal (e.g., e-mail) or formulaic (e.g., professional forms) texts (see, for example, Harris, “Composing Behaviors of One- and Multi-Draft Writers”). However, experienced writers don’t create multiple drafts precisely because they are experienced—they are confident enough in their abilities to feel comfortable composing in one sitting or with little revision—and this experience likely comes from strengths developed through drafting.

Experienced writers understand that some writing situations require speed and formulaic responses; in other words, experienced writers can successfully gauge whether a situation requires the care or extended thought process that creating multiple drafts allows. Inexperienced writers, on the other hand, usually don’t have the best interests of the situation in mind; rather, these writers often don’t draft because they mis-read the importance of the situation or simply don’t want to take the time to extend the writing process.

Other Interesting Findings

Do students arrive in the FYW class as habitual drafters? Some of the journal prompts may help me explore how the students’ entire process changes over the course of the semester.

In addition to learning drafting and other process strategies, many students indicated that learning about and practicing rhetorical analysis—understanding how to analyze and craft an argument—helped them perform better on reading and writing assignments in other classes. Because students benefit in multiple types of assignments—writing and reading—this skill transfers not only between similar settings (e.g., from essay to essay) but also between different settings, which is important.

On Being Part of the Elon Teaching and Learning Partnership

At the start of this process, I selected what I thought was a focused question and manageable methodology.

Now I know that the question, not only about transfer but about students’ drafting habits, and the methodology, research journals that provided insight into students’ perspectives on numerous aspects of writing, is fodder for multiple projects.

The results and discussion published here, while significant, only begin to scrape the surface of the subject. I look forward to continuing to dig.