Student Writers and Their Sense of Authority over Texts

Abstract

One of the major difficulties most of us face is helping student writers write for a responsive audience other than the teacher-evaluator. As Nancy Sommers, Lil Brannon, and C. N. Knoblauch have shown, it is all too easy for teachers to appropriate students' texts and the responsibilities of authorship. 1 Donald M. Murray's solution to the problem is to ask teachers to serve students as coaches who encourage students to read their texts from the perspective of an inquiring reader.2 Both Sommers and Murray have studied the writing processes of professional writers and recognize the problems that student writers confront when they feel that they lack both the authority over their texts and the means for gaining authorial control.3 Other teachers favor turning the classroom into a learning community in which students are each other's primary audience. They contend that students who receive feedback from peers as they move through the subprocesses of composing have a number of advantages: they will experience writing and revising for less threatening audiences than the teacher, and they will learn to discriminate between useful and non-useful feedback and to use their awareness of anticipated audience response as they revise. A peer audience then, can help writers learn to negotiate a way between their readers' suggestions and their own imperatives. Promising as this approach appears, it raises a number of provocative questions for researchers. For example, how do students interact in their writing groups when the teacher isn't there? How do the interactions between group members, teacher, and writer shape what the writer does when she revises? Can we assume that feedback from multiple audiences will help writers improve their texts? In order to study the relationships between student writers and their audiences, I asked ten volunteers from one of my freshman composition classes to think aloud on tape as they worked on multiple drafts of a single essay over a two-and-a-half-week period. I also listened to tapes of the sub-