In “Invention as a Strategy of Revision” (collected in Strategies for Teaching First Year Composition) Roberta A. Binkley suggests an exercise to help students better understand revision. She argues that in early drafts most students’ ideas do not coalesce until the final paragraph: “But frequently in the firs draft it isn’t until the last paragraph that the whole idea for the piece becomes clear and maybe finally expressed” (237). With this in mind, she has her students 1) replace their original first paragraph with their last paragraph 2) rearrange, cut, and add material as necessary so that the paper flows from its new introduction and 3) write a new conclusion. I find this exercise useful because it helps students understand that revision is not simply fixing sentence level errors. Binkley’s assignment forces students to treat the prose of early drafts as malleable, even dispensable, rather than set in stone. Students who believe that revision involves making minute adjustments to a rough draft eliminate myriad interesting possibilities for their papers without even considering them. This exercise helps students to think seriously about the transitions between ideas and how individual paragraphs are related to the whole piece.
While I think that Binkley is generally right that students articulate the main idea late in their papers, it may not always be in the final paragraph. Another version of this assignment might involve asking students to choose any paragraph from their rough draft (other than the first) that they feel best encapsulates the main idea, and then have them revise with that as the new lead paragraph.
Binkley’s exercise is a popular one this week, and for good reason. You rightly observe that the useful paragraph may be one other than the last. The way you’re planning on adapting this activity should work well, especially if you accompany it with a discussion about the problems inherent in rushing to closure.