The twenty-six essays in this collection were written by the twelve students enrolled in my junior academic writing class during the fall semester of 1997 at Daejin University. The class met three hours a week in the Humanities Building--in Room 313 (as you might have already surmised from the beginning of the title chosen by the students). The rest of the title (Should I Revise One More Time?), however, perhaps calls for a little more explanation.
        You see, each of the essays in this volume is actually the end result of a rather long process that included the following stages: (1) brainstorming, discussions, and other forms of "prewriting" about possible topics; (2) a first, a second (and sometimes a third or fourth) draft with further comments, suggestions, and most importantly, lots and lots of questions from me and other students after each draft; and (3) submission of a carefully edited "final" draft.
        To anyone familiar with the way composition is usually taught in Korea, it will come as no surprise that this was a totally new approach for most students which they found to be a little confusing at first. The advantages, however, were that students had a chance to develop their ideas in some depth, benefit from the suggestions of interested readers, and revise and rewrite the parts of their essays that were difficult for their "audience" to understand. In this way, I hoped that students would not only have a chance to produce a few good compositions during the semester, but more importantly, that they would learn something about the process of writing, that is, that they would not just write something for a grade but that they would actually learn how to go about the very difficult task of writing in a foreign language. Student comments at the end of the semester, such as those below, show that they did find the approach beneficial in more ways than one:

"The way I learned English writing in the past, about four years ago, was to submit three essays a week and I took a grade. I remember that I handed in a lot of papers, but it was not effective. Although I submitted only three drafts this semester, it was sufficient to know the way of writing." (Park Ho Ryong)

"Although complete essays are only three, each essay has at least three drafts. So I wrote more than ten essays actually. Of course, quality matters more than quantity.  My writing seemed to be improved in my studies by writing lots of essays. As a result, my fear of English writing went away." (Jang Yu Mi)

"Maybe the most important thing of all is to develop confidence. By writing and revising three essays and many paragraphs, I got the practice that is needed to have more self-assurance." (Kim Hye-Seon)