3 essay types · Plan, write, and compare to model responses
Many students and even some professionals treat the first draft as a near-final product — resisting deep revision and treating editing as a cosmetic fix. Writing teachers, however, argue that revision is where real thinking happens: that the draft is just a starting point, and that substantive, global revision is what separates competent writing from excellent writing.
Write an essay that argues your position on the following question:
Is revision essential to good writing, or can a skilled writer produce excellent work without deep revision?
Model Thesis: "Although some writers — particularly those with extensive experience — can produce polished prose in few drafts, revision is essential for most writers precisely because the act of writing itself generates thinking that cannot be planned in advance; a draft is a discovery document, and revision is where that discovery is refined into argument."
Why this thesis works: It concedes something real (experienced writers may need less revision) while defending a clear position and explaining the mechanism behind it (writing as a discovery process).
Requires a defensible, specific claim beyond restating the prompt. Model thesis: 1 pt.
Scores 3–4 require specific, relevant evidence AND commentary explaining how it proves the claim. No dropped quotes.
Earned here by the nuanced concession ("internalized prior revision") and the reframe in the conclusion.
Read the following passage carefully. Then write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices the author makes to convey her argument about the writing process. In your response, you should focus on how her choices of structure, evidence, tone, and figurative language work together to advance her central claim.
Do not simply summarize the passage. Your essay must analyze how the rhetorical choices work — not just what the passage says.
We have been lying to our students about what writing is. For decades, composition classrooms have displayed the writing process as a tidy diagram — a flowchart of boxes and arrows moving from brainstorm to outline to draft to publish, each stage neatly sealed before the next begins. The diagram is a fiction. No working writer has ever lived inside it.
Real writing is messier, more honest, and far more interesting than any flowchart can show. It begins not with an idea but with a suspicion — a hunch that something needs to be said, combined with a troubling uncertainty about what exactly that something is. The draft, then, is not a product. It is a process of finding out. You write the first paragraph to discover what the second paragraph should say. You write the whole essay and find, buried in the penultimate paragraph, the thesis you wished you had begun with.
Revision, therefore, is not the polishing of a finished thought. It is the excavation of the thought that the draft has only begun to unearth. A geologist does not apologize for the drilling — the drilling is the science. Neither should a writer apologize for the revision. The revision is the writing.
I have watched students spend forty minutes "revising" an essay by correcting commas. Comma correction is not revision. It is anxiety management. True revision requires the courage to cut — to kill the sentence you love most because it is pulling the essay in a direction the thesis cannot follow. It requires the admission that what you thought you meant and what you actually wrote are not always the same thing. That admission is not weakness. It is the beginning of a writer's honesty.
— Adapted from "Against the Flowchart," a craft essay on the writing processModel Thesis: "Through a structure that mirrors the recursive process she defends, extended geological metaphor, and a tone that shifts from indictment to encouragement, the author argues that revision is not a corrective but an epistemological act — the means by which writers discover what they actually think."
Why this thesis works: Names specific choices (structure, metaphor, tonal shift), links them to effect, and frames the central claim in a way that goes beyond summary.
Must name specific choices and their effect on the argument — not just "the author uses rhetoric."
3–4 pts: specific textual evidence + analysis of HOW each choice serves the argument. Not just identification.
Earned by noting how structure enacts the argument — form-content inseparability is a high-level observation.
Many schools teach the writing process as a linear sequence: prewrite, draft, revise, edit, publish. Critics argue this model is inaccurate and pedagogically harmful — that it teaches students a fiction rather than the messy, recursive reality of how writing actually works. Defenders argue that a simplified model gives students structure they need before they can internalize complexity.
Read the six sources below carefully. Then write an essay that synthesizes at least three of the sources to develop and support your position on the following question:
Should schools teach the writing process as a fixed linear sequence, or should they present it as a recursive, non-linear process?
"Studies of expert writers consistently show that they do not follow linear models. Instead, they engage in constant, overlapping cognitive activities — planning, translating ideas into text, and revising — simultaneously rather than sequentially. Novice writers, by contrast, tend toward linearity, treating each stage as complete before moving to the next. Research suggests this linearity contributes to weaker overall writing quality."
Adapted from Flower & Hayes, "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing," College Composition and Communication, 1981"I spent years posting the writing process chart on my classroom wall. My students memorized the stages. They could recite them in order. And yet their essays did not improve — because they were following the chart rather than actually thinking. The chart gave them a procedure to perform rather than a habit of mind to develop. I took it down."
Adapted from a high school English teacher's professional development essay, 2019"Beginning writers need scaffolding. The linear model is not meant to describe how all writers write; it is meant to give students with no writing habits a structure to enter. Once internalized, that structure becomes flexible. The problem is not the model — it is teachers who present it as prescriptive rather than descriptive."
Adapted from a composition pedagogy textbook, 2017"In a 2022 survey of 400 high school students, 78% reported that they 'never return to their thesis after writing body paragraphs,' and 65% reported revising only at the sentence level. When asked why, the most common response was: 'I thought revising meant fixing mistakes.' Only 12% described revision as 'rethinking the argument.'"
Adapted from a National Writing Project survey, 2022"Every book I've written has taught me what it was about. Not before I started — after I'd written the first draft and discovered, in the writing, what I was actually trying to say. I threw away the first 80 pages of my second novel. Not because they were badly written sentences, but because I didn't know yet what the novel needed. That discovery was the revision."
Adapted from a novelist's interview in The Paris Review, 2020"There is a developmental question here that critics of the linear model often ignore: young writers — particularly elementary and middle school writers — may genuinely need the cognitive simplicity of a linear model before they can handle the complexity of recursion. Teaching recursion to a third grader may produce confusion rather than flexibility. Scaffolded linearity may be age-appropriate pedagogy that should be phased out, not eliminated."
Adapted from a literacy education journal, 2021Model Thesis: "While the linear model provides necessary scaffolding for young writers who lack any compositional framework, schools should phase it out by middle school and replace it with an honest, recursive model — because presenting writing as a neat sequence systematically teaches students that revision means correcting mistakes rather than rethinking arguments, a misconception that Source D's data shows is nearly universal."
Why this thesis works: It concedes the scaffolding argument (Source C, F), takes a clear position, provides a mechanism (what students learn from the linear model), and grounds the claim in specific evidence (Source D).
Defensible position that goes beyond "both sides have merit." Names the mechanism of the harm.
Uses 4+ sources with clear attribution AND commentary explaining how each supports the claim.
Earned by the developmental concession (Source F) and the reframe: the model doesn't just simplify — it inverts expert practice.