This website is available to all who wish to use its resources and who wish to contribute to its assignments and links for teachers and students. It was conceived as an appendix to the rhetorical approaches community college teachers--and particularly those at Santa Barbara City College--use to teach students how to revise.

In The Revision Toolbox, Georgia Heard, considering the process of learning revision, writes that students “need...time to practice. Plus, revision usually happens over time. We can’t expect students to revise every single piece that they write until it’s perfect” (92).

Given that we have students for 15 weeks, and that it takes us a few weeks at least to get them oriented to our way of thinking about and practicing writing, we do not have, in any practical way, time for students to become “A” writers if they are producing any less than “A” work at the beginning of the semester. If progress takes considerable time, then it stands to reason that giving students course grades based on their writing ability alone would be impractical and defeating. Instead, a course in writing and in revision should stress the aura of the relationship one has with one’s writing: the cultivated need to say what one has to say as clearly and honestly as possible.

This idea of cultivating oneself along with one’s writing is neither new nor an idea difficult for talented teachers to implement. The real trouble is time—the limited time teachers are allowed with students to help them achieve high standards and to make necessary and sometimes monumentally steep progress. Where we tend to see time, that is teaching opportunities that arise after students write a paper draft, we also tend to lose time by neglecting the various revisionary niches that avail themselves at various points of the thinking, writing, or transformational process.

If given enough time, perhaps two or three years, or few enough students, 30-50 per semester, teachers no doubt could help students make marked improvements. But we have spent too much time already belaboring our misfortune, agonizing over tiny education budgets, talking about what could be. Here we are still, with 144 students each semester, sometimes more, and as has been the problem of every teacher these students have had before us, we face an alarming range of student abilities in every class.

The good news is, students do learn. They learn with us and without us, they gain strength over time, they return from summer break intellectually more mature than when we last saw them. Revision is always working, and it is in that spirit that I hope you will find our web site helpful.