What is your disposition toward writing/revising?

What is your disposition toward writing (and by that I mean revising) ? I don't mean just whether you like it or not, or whether you think you are good at it or not. "Disposition" is more about how you approach writing. You may have heard that one person has a "sunny disposition," while someone else has a "cloudy disposition." I recently stumbled across the solar images section of NASA's website. Here you can see current images of our sun, taken regularly through powerful telescopes. This is my kind of sunny disposition: one that is filled with energy, that has incredible power, and changes constantly.

One's disposition toward writing and your own writing process significantly influences the kind of writing you can do. Novice writers tend to view the act of writing as getting all their knowledge about a subject down -- a behavior psychologists Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia call "knowledge-telling," and what I call puking on the page.

In my experience, another characteristic of novice writers is that they resist revision. George Hillocks, emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, says novice writers are often apprehensive about their writing and their writing process. As a result, they get very attached to the writing they are able to create and resist making changes to it. "Writers often view their words as representing themselves," Hillocks hypothesizes. "That is why they become upset when someones attacks their words. They see the attack as directed against themselves rather than against the words they have uttered" (83). I put the word "attack" in italics because some student writers resist giving or getting feedback. They take feedback only as criticism of the writer and his or her writing. They seem to think that any feedback begins with the assumption that something is wrong.

Mature writers, on the other hand, tend to see their writing as thinking. Writing is thinking that has been transformed into words and sentences so that others can consider it. Writing is thinking transformed into language so that the writer can re-consider it. If I want to figure something out -- be it a research question or a problem I'm having with a family member -- I write about it. And because my writing is thinking, it changes as my thinking changes. Writing helps transform my thinking -- what Bereiter and Scardamalia call "knowledge-transformation."

As a mature writer (remember, that doesn't mean that I act maturely, but that I have a mature disposition about writing) my disposition is that writing is a valuable tool, but I am much more than my writing. I see feedback not as an attack, but as a mirror. The reader is reflecting only what they see in the writing. I can consider their reflection, but do not have to accept it as the only was to see my work. That's why I ask more than one person to give me feedback. If I hear similar reflections from different people, then I get a better idea of what needs to be revised.

For me, reader feedback is similar to these solar images from NASA: each is colored differently because a different light spectrum was used to filter the image from the telescope. Each is an image from the same sun, but reflects different light. Taken together, they help scientists learn more about the sun.

What's more, although I am attached to the ideas in my writing, I try not to get to attached to the words themselves. The writing you read today in this blog represents my current thinking on the topic. But my thinking changes even as I write it down, so it is never my last word on a topic. I can always find something to change to make it better, stronger, clearer. My disposition toward my writing is that it serves my thinking, but it can never perfectly represent it.

What is your disposition?

Works Cited

Bereiter, Carl and Marlene Scardamalia. The Psychology of Written Composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987. Print.

Hillocks, George Jr. Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice. New York: Teachers College Press, 1995. Print.

"SOHO Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope." 17 Feb. 2010.  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center. 19 Feb. 2010. Web.