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How do you know what to do when you are revising your writing? Revision always involves making a judgment about your own work. You become a self-evaluator. But what criteria do you use?<\/p>\n
Art educator and philosopher Elliott Eisner (1976, pp. 140-141) suggested that any evaluation of your own and\/or others\u2019 artistic or creative work demands a combination of connoisseurship and the critical.<\/p>\n
Eisner described the art of connoisseurship as a private appreciation of experiences, be they gastronomic, aesthetic or textual. And appreciation, according to Eisner, means both being informed about the qualities of the experience and discerning of its attributes and subtleties \u2013 sometimes called developing \u201ctaste\u201d and understanding \u201cquality\u201d. These two terms, taste and quality, indicate the connection of connoisseurship with norms and social\/economic power.<\/p>\n
Appreciation is \u201cthe basis for judgment\u201d, Eisner wrote. But he argued that appreciative connoisseurship is insufficient by itself in evaluation. The public art of the critic is also important.<\/p>\n
The critic\u2019s job is, according to Eisner, to disclose the object of appreciation (a cuisine, a wine, a text) using \u201cadumbration, suggestion, implication, connotation and rendering\u201d. The critic does not translate. The critic interprets, \u201cusing metaphor and analogy, suggestion and implication\u201d, in order to \u201cbrightly illuminate\u201d, to help themselves and others to \u2018see\u2019 what a work or a text might be and mean.<\/p>\n
Eisner\u2019s twinned concepts of connoisseur and critic can be helpful when thinking about revising academic writing. The Janus-like connoisseur-critic reads and appreciatively evaluates their own and other\u2019s writings. They develop ideas about what constitutes \u201cgood\u201d academic writing, also understanding that any judgments of writing quality are framed by disciplines, institutions and wider social norms.<\/p>\n
Connoisseur judgments can be put to the test through public discussions. It is through discussion in reading groups and in our writing about literatures, that we can develop, explain, deconstruct and justify our evaluative writing criteria. Our internalised understandings of the writer\u2019s craft \u2013 structure, narrative, word choice, sentence length and syntax, metaphor and simile, anecdote and so on \u2013 may be challenged. But this helps to build our academic writing knowledge and know-how.<\/p>\n
Losing the metaphor, we can say that is through ongoing reading that we develop own internalised criteria for what counts as \u2018good\u2019 in academic writing. Further, we can say that outing our internalised appreciative ideas means that we can examine, in public and perhaps in the company of others, our own writing decisions, assumptions and beliefs. Such public writing conversations may challenge and reduce the restrictive power of unhelpful norms.<\/p>\n
We can then put our interrogated criteria for \u2018good writing\u2019 to the task of refining and revising our crappy first drafts. Reading for the writing supports our own writing.<\/p>\n