Revision: Who Else Hates It?

[COBLENTZ@DT3.DT.UH.EDU]

I have just finished a very alienating (never mind why--that's another story to
be told on a horror-stories thread or perhaps in the SCWCA Newsletter) first 
summer session.  That is now over and over and over (praise whatever gods that
be), so I'm ready to get ready for next year and to extend myself in various
benign and loving ways.  What do I find?  Everything I had in mind requires 
that I revise something I've already written!!!!

At this stage, I'm planning to log off my life temporarily.  I cannot bring
myself to rethink, to reimaginagine, to revise.  I won't do it.  That's it.
I'm good at innovation, not continual application.  I can't stand it!!!!

How do you suppose my abhorrence for revision affects my tutoring?  Worse yet,
how does it affect the Writing Center I direct?  My consoling idea is that the
very fact that revision is the bane of my existence makes me value it more, 
makes me try to teach its importance more carefully, and makes me admires me
admire those who do easily results in a better tutoring technique and a better
Writing Center.  It doesn't give me clue about how to stay interested in what
I have to say.

However, this is facile idea that has not been revised! (Okay--I added the
last sentence in the previous paragraph when I went back to read what I had 
said.  That is surely not revision.))

My revision process when I am creating is almost invisible to me.  It happens
long before I'm conscious of it.  I think it has already happened here, even
though I think I'm throwing first ideas up on the screen.  If I can't slow down
my own writing process, how can I be sure that I can slow down those of others?

The real question is how do our own preferences in writing affect the way we
tutor and the way we design out Writing Centers?

Reluctantly Resigned to Weeks of Revising,
Linda Coblentz  
UH-Downtown