She also found that surface level changes predominated over meaning changes. Direct teacher intervention, however, seems to produce positive results. Further, the comments often took students' attention away from their own purposes and focused it on those of the teacher. Sommers suggests that teachers provide more specific comments and design writing activities that allow students to establish purpose in their writing. Publishing student writings can be a powerful means of motivating revision.
Publication instills pride and provides an incentive to produce good work.
Additionally, Balajthy recommends providing students with in-class time for revision and allowing flexibility in due dates as a way to encourage students to engage in more extensive revision. The ease with which students can manipulate text with word processing programs has prompted increased computer use in the writing classroom as a means of promoting student revision. However, the research on whether computers lead students to revise more frequently or more effectively is somewhat inconclusive. Flinn found that sixth graders using computers to revise compositions wrote longer papers and received slightly higher holistic scores than those using pen and paper. However, the most striking differences between the groups had less to do with computers than with an instructional emphasis on fluency, word choice, and mechanics.