ABSTRACT
Nancy Sommers has a reserved place in composition anthologies. In her award-winning essay “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” (1980), she challenged linear models of the composition process with a recursive understanding of writing that brought revision to the forefront of the field. In “Responding to Student Writing” (1982), also an award winner, she warned against teachers appropriating student texts in their comments and instead offered strategies for response focused on revision and discovery. An attention to pedagogy and student writers, especially in revision and response, has been a hallmark of Sommers’s career. She received her doctorate in education from Boston University and went on to direct Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for 20 years. Sommers served as the principal investigator for the longitudinal Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, which tracked the writing experiences and development of 400 students. She has also produced three short films focused on amplifying student voices within composition pedagogy. In “Beyond the Red Ink,” she spotlights student perceptions of teacher comments. Sommers currently teaches in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and is the lead author of the Hacker handbooks series published by Bedford/St. Martin’s. Her later writing has tended to be more personal as she has explored family histories, personal narratives, and evocative photographs in order to better understand the work of writing, teaching, and living—which she also presents as a process. At the end of “I Stand Here Writing,” Sommers notes, “With writing and with teaching, as well as with love, we don’t know how the sentence will begin and, rarely ever, how it will end.” 1
