Let the Record Build: Revision, Reflection, and AI

Writing or creating in public usually means letting people see the process along with the product: the drafts, the missteps, the number of times you’ve changed your mind. Austin Kleon built a book around the idea (2014), and Shawn Wang made the case for learning where others can watch (2018). Lately, AI has pushed more people to build in the open, sharing projects they might never have started on their own on X and other social platforms.

I did the same with this website, and I’ve borrowed the habit for my own essays. Essays here carry a note on what I revised, a revision number, and an attestation about how I used AI. Every page has its own process label and short revision reflection. The revision reflection is self-reported, so it’s not proof, which is probably an essay in itself. But when my college students look me up, I hope they see process and not just a finished product. It’s the revision mindset I spend most of my English 101 and 102 courses trying to teach.

In my English 101 classes, I’m not looking for perfect citations or a banger paper; I’m really just looking for an attempt to think something through: to weigh ideas against each other and see where they lead. Most first-year writers treat revision as cleanup: a swapped word here, a fixed comma there. Nancy Sommers (1980) found that experienced writers revise more globally and more recursively: they rethink as they go. First-year writers rarely get to witness that discovery process of circling back and all around as the draft teaches them what they’re arguing, especially with assignments piling up. Because I don’t require tools that log drafts, like Google Docs version history, I can’t know whether a paper was reworked over a week or the night before it was due.

One of my main assignments is an autoethnography, borrowed from Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs’s Writing About Writing (2023). Students study their own process and decide which tools and habits actually work for them. If I were to mandate Google Docs, I’d have answered that question before they ask it. At the same time, without timestamps, I’m inferring process from the page, which is a guess. I go back and forth on whether that trade is worth it, and I haven’t settled it yet.

I have the same unsettled feeling when I fold lessons on AI-use citations into the classroom. Even when it’s done correctly per MLA or APA guidelines, a citation tells a reader that a tool was involved, but not how. Formats tend to assume one of two stories: the writer drafted and the AI polished, or the AI drafted and the writer cleaned up. Most real use lives in between, and that’s where the learning and ethics happen.

Reflections have always been a tool for getting students to think about the significance, the why. Even during the reading process, which can include the same meaning-making processes as writing (Zamel, 1992), reflecting on why a passage stands out or why it’s interesting can help students understand not only what they found important, but why (p. 476). I’ve often assigned reflections on the writing process between major papers in my composition courses, but I haven’t yet asked my students for anything as heavy as continually reflecting on their revision process, or even tracking their AI use throughout their process or on every paper. Although I can get buy-in between papers on a short, low-stakes reflection, I’m not convinced these assigned reflections between papers as I’ve been having students do them help them understand the significance of revision any more than a “research paper” helps them understand how research applies to writing (Larson, 1982). The autoethnography, especially when I lead with it as their first paper in English 101, is already one big reflection on their habits. Most of my energy in 101 goes toward getting students to put a draft on the page sometime sooner than the night before it’s due, and I still worry that piling reflections on top of the main ask shortchanges the point of the autoethnography as a whole.

Besides, most composition departments want to see process in an academic paper, not a stack of reflections about one. But I keep coming back to the idea that the major paper can stay the artifact while a short reflection carries the process. I haven’t figured out how to persuade students to take on the extra reflections while they write their major papers, let alone fit it all into some of my 8-week sessions, so I’m doing it myself on this website this semester.

At the time of writing this draft, there’s no essay on this website where I changed my mind between drafts. I wouldn’t want to manufacture that evidence anyway. What I can do is leave my drafts up (whatever state they’re in), keep the notes honest, and let the record build. I hope that if I stick with this long enough, a student who googles me (or asks their AI assistant to) will find a piece where I was wrong about something, said so, and kept revising.

References

Kleon, A. (2014). Show your work! 10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered. Workman Publishing.

Larson, R. L. (1982). The “research paper” in the writing course: A non-form of writing. College English, 44(8), 811–816. https://doi.org/10.2307/377337

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378–388. https://doi.org/10.2307/356588

Wang, S. (2018). Learn in public. swyx.io. https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public

Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (2023). Writing about writing (5th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Zamel, V. (1992). Writing one’s way into reading. TESOL Quarterly, 26(3), 463–485. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587174

References

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