Does cutting time mean cutting revision?

Believe it or not, I'm actually working on my thesis again. I'm only producing a couple of pages a week, but that's more than I produced for the entirety of the summer.

What I want to look at in the next week is the issue of time. In composition, the main criticism of procrastination is that it leaves the student with too little time to write. "Don't wait to the last minute to start your papers," we advise our students. When procrastination is mentioned in an article, it is usually followed with a reference to abbreviated revision time. Donna Gorrell says that students use procrastination to motivate themselves to write, but this creates the problem that "ideas which are essentially rough-hewn must remain that way, since there is no time for revision" (645). Ronald A. Sudol suggests (in 1985) that limited access to computer labs will prevent students from procrastinating, since they can only write when they can get in the computer lab, and that "the time spent reducing procrastination now can be better spent revising later" (332). This is the composition party line--procrastination is bad because it reduces time writing which eliminates revision.

First off, let's question the assumption that procrastination will necessitate chopping off some element of the writing process. When I delay a writing project, I have in mind how long I think it will take me to churn something out based on my personal writing process. I don't cut down my writing process, I just move it as close to the deadline as possible. I prewrite, I draft, I prewrite, I draft, I revise, I revise, I research, I revise, I revise. This is the same writing strategy I used as an undergrad. I may compress my writing process based on time, but I don't eliminate chunks of it.

Notice that we assume that revision is the part of writing that will be cut--not prewriting or drafting. The obvious reason is that revision occurs at the end of writing, and if we've managed our time poorly, we run out of time before we get to that part. But is that even true? I think Gorrell's example suggests that students use procrastination instead of prewriting, not revision. She writes that "Having a paper due the next morning is a marvelous incentive for the flow of ideas. Thoughts which earlier would not come now suddenly spring forward" (645). Isn't she suggesting that students procrastinate as an invention strategy, a kind of prewriting technique? Maybe where they're cutting time is actually on the front end of writing, not the back end.

And anyway, do we buy this "front end"/"back end" business? I thought we agreed that writing was recursive, not linear. Remember my writing process from above? Certainly revision can't occur at the beginning (unless one is reworking an old project), but it isn't a set amount of time at the end of a writing session. "Okay, done with drafting. Now time for revision." Some people may write that way, but certainly not all people. Even if the back end of writing is what's being cut off when students procrastinate, that's no guarantee that revision is skipped entirely.

My advisor has also helpfully suggested that I look at recommendations to "set aside" writing for an hour or a day or whatever. This is another prescription that revolves around time at the back end of a project for revision. But we should remember that time on the front end of a project can also be useful. We wouldn't likely label it procrastination, but we can let our ideas "incubate" before we start writing, adding time to the front end of the writing process. Donald Murray recommends this in "Write before Writing," and Maxine Hairston suggests that writing teachers can tackle their own procrastination by accepting is as part of a productive writing process and allowing it to pass after a few days (68). But we rarely give this kind of advice to students.

Works Cited

Gorrell, Donna. "A Comment on 'Toward Irrational Heuristics.'" College English 44.6 (1982): 644-645.

Hairston, Maxine. "When Writing Teachers Don't Write: Speculations about Probable Causes and Possible Cures." Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 62-70.

Murray, Donald. "Write before Writing." College Composition and Communication 29.4 (1978): 375-381.

Sudol, Ronald A. "Applied Word Processing: Notes on Authority, Responsibility, and Revision in a Workshop Model." College Composition and Communication 36.3 (1985): 331-335.

Traditional Process Studies Had to Omit Procrastination

My study goes against the grain of process pedagogy, I think. You see, procrastination is a process issue, even if no process theorist has ever talked about procrastination in an article. But I'm really studying the written product! I'm not analyzing protocols of the steps the participants went through as they wrote their papers. I'm circling and categorizing errors. Sure, I'm also looking at questionnaires in which the participants gave some information about their writing process, but this isn't how process studies traditionally go.

And that's got to be part of the reason that procrastination wasn't studied during the heyday of process studies. If you're doing the cognitive protocol-based study, you're in a controlled environment watching the participant go through the whole process of writing. And while you can get useful information that way, you're missing a huge part of the picture of writing. The huge part that allows you to procrastinate for hours, days, weeks, or more. Time.

If you take writing out of a laboratory setting, a lot more goes on. You can't very well follow a freshman around for the whole semester to jot down every time she thinks about her term paper out loud. So while technically procrastination is a process issue, it didn't fit into the model for empirical studies that process theorists were using.

This is bad. What it did was allow our profession to have strong feelings about procrastination as an important issue since it apparently represented a dysfunctional writing process without research to support our beliefs. If we're teaching process, we're not going to just let our students wait until the last minute to start working on their papers--they need to be thinking and prewriting and drafting and revising over the course of time. Not just churning something out the night before the paper is due.

But none of this is based on empirical research. There weren't any studies done in our field to suggest that procrastination led to bad writing--and how do we know it's part of a bad process if we don't know it leads to a bad product?

"Uneducated"

Someone I know personally has recently been slinging the insult "uneducated" toward people she disagrees with politically. She, however, did not graduate eighth grade and has a low level of literacy. I don't really know how to react to this. Even if people are uneducated, does that make them bad people? Does it make them unable to have reasoned opinions on political issues? And how does an uneducated person assert her superiority to others by suggesting that they are uneducated? Is the insult that entrenched that she can say it without blinking?

"Writing" is self-paced, but a narrow view of writing

In "Writing as a Mode of Learning," Janet Emig indicates that writing is self-paced, and that "one writes best as one learns best, at one's own pace" (12). I'm reading and rereading this in context to try to determine whether this has anything to do with procrastination. Out of context, I could jump up and say that if writers ideally write at their own pace, we must be careful of pushing deadlines and labelling writers "procrastinators" for not meeting those deadlines.

But I hesitate to say that's what Emig was really getting at. She elaborates on the sentence in question by saying that "to connect the two processes [writing and learning], writing can sponsor learning because it can match its pace" (12). Now this may still imply that students have to write at their own pace, but I don't think that is Emig's point here. I think she's saying that students learn through writing because they only go as fast as they put words on paper. In fact, I think she's using the narrow view of writing I mentioned in my last post--actually sitting down and putting words on paper, not considering an assignment, thinking about a topic, doing research, and so on.

This reading of Emig is supported when she cites Sartre, who said he couldn't write anymore because listening to himself on tape was no kind of way to revise. He might need to review his words slowly, or he might want to skim through, but where writing and reading allow for that kind of self-pacing, talking and listening to a recording do not (13).

Emig, Janet. "Writing as a Mode of Learning." 1977. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 7-16.

Writing vs. Doing Homework

It just occurred to me as I am reading old process literature, that it was quite easy to skip over procrastination based on certain approaches to studying process.

A certain segment of process researchers were looking for a scientific way to study writing. They used tape recorders and coding systems. They wanted to be objective and to have replicable results. These are essentially lab-based studies, then. The researchers would set up the lab, give the student an assignment, and study them on the spot, likely asking the student to talk through their thoughts and actions as they wrote.

This kind of research is useful and even important, but by being lab-based, it loses the ability to study procrastination at all. I mean, I suppose some students would still delay in a lab environment, but it's a rather different kind of situation than being given an assignment to turn in within a week, let alone by the end of the semester.

This makes some sense, in that the researchers were more interested in writing itself, not "doing homework." On the other hand, psychology researchers have tended to be more interested in the "doing homework" side, and this explains why I have found more of their research to be directly relevant to my study.

Procrastination is a Process Issue

So I'd like to go over the state of research in procrastination in writing over time.

The sixties seem to be the last decade devoid of procrastination research. However, this decade is far from being irrelevant. In the sixties, we are introduced to "process pedagogy," a way of teaching writing that emphasizes "process"--the steps writers go through as they produce a document--over "product"--the final document. A product-oriented pedagogy asks "What does good writing look like?" But with a process-oriented pedagogy, the question is, "How do I produce good writing?" The distinction here is that knowing what makes for a good product doesn't explain how one goes about producing it.

So why is process pedagogy relevant to my study of procrastination in writing? Because procrastination is not an element of the written product, it's an element of the writing process. Theoretically, a product-oriented pedagogy shouldn't care about procrastination. As long as the paper turns out okay, it doesn't really matter when it was started.

But in process pedagogy, writers are expected to go through certain steps in producing their work. These steps may not be hard and fast--we can divide simply into prewriting, drafting, and revising. But because of the time crunch in procrastination, some of these steps may be rushed or skipped.

I need to go back to some early process literature to see if anyone hints at issues of procrastination or time crunch.

Citing a self-help book

I've noticed several articles cite that procrastination rates may be "as high as ninety-five percent." My impression was that this number was frequently cited because it was the highest, not because it was the most accurate. I flipped to the reference page. The reference? Overcoming Procrastination, published by the Institute for Rational Living. I was a bit concerned that we were citing a book here, not a study. And not the most scholarly sounding book at that.

I requested the book. I opened it to the first page. Here's the opening:

How many college-level individuals procrastinate? Often? Seriously? No one seems to know. Incredibly, this important question has not inspired many factual studies. Our guess? About ninety-five percent. (Ellis and Knaus 1)

So it's just a guess? And this thirty-year-old guess is still being cited? The authors aren't even researchers; they're psychotherapists. Which is not to say they don't know what they're talking about, but rather to ask why on earth serious researchers keep citing them instead of doing some actual research on the numbers. I wonder if some of the citations were borrowed from other sources without checking the original source. It's not a scholarly source. It's a self-help book.

Work Cited

Ellis, Albert, and William J. Knaus. Overcoming Procrastination, or How to Think and Act Rationally in Spite of Life's Inevitable Hassles. New York: Institute for Rational Living, 1977.