The 2011 Symposium on Student Writing

Response, Reflection, Revision

March 30, 2011

11:00am - 2:00pm 

Sponsored by the University of Louisville Composition Program

Revision is often messy, difficult work that tends to be brushed under the rug when writers present a finished project.  In the 2011 Symposium on Student Writing, we want to bring to light the difficult decisions that writers make as they revise their work.  We believe that the best revisions are the ones that look at the overall design of a text—how it is structured, what it is arguing, how it is presented—in order to re-envision new possibilities and new directions.  Thus, we are calling for student presentations from writing classes across the university that illustrate the design choices that writers make as they revise their work.  The symposium, therefore, provides an opportunity to make visible the learning and critical thinking processes that are already the cornerstone of most writing classes.

Presentations for the symposium may take the form of posters, PowerPoint presentations, audio essays, videos, or any other format that lends itself to illustrating the design choices that writers make as they move from rough to revised versions of their work.

Sample Projects

Examples of projects that meet the symposium theme include presentations that:

• Highlight and comment upon the changes writers made in moving from a rough draft to a more finished product.  Such presentations could focus on the way that the writer’s growing understanding of genre conventions or audience influenced revisions. 
• Illustrate how the elements of reasoning or intellectual standards of critical thinking influenced a writer’s design choices.
•  Make visible the social dimensions of revising by emphasizing the roles that other individuals—including peer commentators, instructors, other authors the writer has cited—have played in shaping the design of the project.
• Reflect on the design choices that writers made as they “translated” a project from one medium to another or reinterpreted the same content for different audiences.  For instance, a project might highlight the design choices made as a traditional print text was translated into a website or a multimodal composition or as an academic paper was translated into an essay for a general audience. 
• Illustrate group revision processes by demonstrating how a team of students worked together to design revisions to a collaborative writing project.
• Discuss future design changes that a writer intends to make in future revisions of a text.
• Demonstrate in any other way the design choices that writers make as they meet the demands of revising their work.

 The Symposium Event

On March 30th, we will ask students to present these projects.  We ask students to be physically present for at least part of the symposium so that audience members can ask questions about their design choices and suggest additional revisions or design decisions that writers might want to consider in future versions of their work. 

For more information, contact Alicia Brazeau: ambraz01@louisville.edu