Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction (Crosscurrents : New Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition)

[This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations.

- Journal of Advanced Composition

In Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by "revision," urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life.

Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study:

• to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications
• to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision.

In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers.

This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.