Osborn, Susan. “’Revision/Re-Vision’: A Feminist Writing Class.”
Osborn writes about a class she taught focusing on women’s writing in which she explicitly aimed for her students to both revise their writing and revision their thinking. Frustrated with views of revision that conceptualize it as a phase in a linear process, she seeks to connect the recursive nature of thinking with revision. The revising of thinking and the revising of writing both, she suggests,
require an examination of old texts, a repositioning of self in relation to subject, and a reentering of those old representations from a new critical direction. Just as the writer does her first drafts, the re-visioning woman works to reconstruct those symbolic representations in a new and differently meaningful way. Both processes require a transformation in accustomed ways of thinking and involve not just a crossing out of old words, but the development of new concepts, new relational paradigms, new symbolic solutions that make meaning of our experience. (261)
She attempts to have her students do this by having them revision and revise definitions of gendered terms such as “hero.” In addition to revisioning individually, Osborn’s students also revision collectively. Osborn “hoped to create another situation in which revision is validated as a way of knowing ourselves and texts” (266). Osborn very explicitly connects the revision of writing to the revisioning of thinking. She assesses her class as a success, with students successfully revising and revisioning. The kind of explicit connection between revisioning and revision that Osborn makes isn’t seen again until Nancy Welch’s Getting Restless in 1997.
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