12.4: How It Works

Intentions—a sense of audience and purpose and of what the writer wants the essay to do—are essential to a good piece of communicative writing. Anson makes the point that when an instructor asks a student to verbalize his or her intentions, it is much more likely that the student will have intentions (qtd. in Yancey and Smith 174). We saw this process in mid-struggle with our imaginary student’s work (above), and we’ll see it handled more effectively in real student examples (below). As many composition scholars explain, reflective and self-assessing activities help writers set goals for their writing. For instance, Rebecca Moore Howard states that “writers who can assess their own prose can successfully revise that prose” (36). This position is further illustrated by Xiaoguang Cheng and Margaret S. Steffenson, who conducted and then reported a study clearly demonstrating a direct positive effect of reflection on student revising processes in “Metadiscourse: A Technique for Improving Student Writing.” Yancey and Smith argue that self-assessment and reflection are essential to the learning process because they are a “method for assigning both responsibility and authority to a learner” (170). Students then become independent learners who can take what they learn about writing into the future beyond a particular class rather than remaining dependent on teachers or peer evaluators (171). Anson echoes this idea, saying that reflection helps a writer grow beyond simply succeeding in a particular writing project: “Once they begin thinking about writing productively, they stand a much better chance of developing expertise and working more successfully in future writing situations” (73).