new assignment - "it's wise to revise"

This semester I've decided to try a new assignment in place of the expanded I-Search. Instead, I'm incorporating what I've titled "It's Wise to Revise." It's basically a chance for each student to pick one of his/her papers from the course to expand and revise. If this new version of the paper receives a higher score than its original grade, I'm offering to replace the original grade with the grade of the expanded and revised version. Along with this assignment, I'm requiring an in-class essay (which is mandatory, replacing the mandatory workshop of other papers) during which the student will reflect upon his/her expansion and revision using the academic vocabulary learned throughout the course.



I believe that the chance to revisit a paper will really reiterate some of the concepts associated with that paper (i.e. revisiting MLA citations in the I-Search, utilizing critical reading for the textual analysis in more depth, adding to descriptive and dialogue content in the memoir, etc). I also believe that implementing the replacement grade incentive will show students that revision is both necessary and has positive results! My goal is that the students will be able to see how much their writing has improved over the semester; if the distance between the original paper and the revised version is long enough, the student might even have forgotten what he/she wrote and will be able to look at his/her own work from an objective critical reading standpoint, a POV that can be very beneficial to new writers. New writers rarely get the opportunity for self-evaluation; as rhetorician Susan Miller writes in her article "How Writers Evaluate Their Own Writing," “Self-evaluation – experiencing the quality of one’s writing in relation to subjective standards – is crucial to the development of an individual’s perception of writing as an important and ‘natural’ way to investigate problems and represent ideas” (182). By evaluating their own work during the semester and choosing which paper they'd like to expand and revise, students retain that subjective power they might miss in a typical assignment.