Others try to write everything they think about a topic so that they can find out what they know or don't know, what they like and dislike, and build from there. Writers develop a sensitivity to the sound of their language, their choice of the structure of their composition, the clarity of their ideas, the support for their positions. Thinking evolves, language becomes precise and powerful. Most of us recognize that we are revising when we rephrase a part of the first sentence we write. But Revision is also a rethinking about our ideas and how best to convey them.
Skilled writers store a wide range of revising strategies in their writing repertoire.
Editing begins for many of us with the first sentence or two when we question whether we've misspelled a word, placed a comma where it is needed, or constructed parallelism when we presented a list of terms. But editing goes beyond Spellcheck and Grammar check. Editing refers to the kinds of decisions writers make in an effort to produce writing in which each word and each punctuation mark is correct as it is, and diction or sentence structure has flow. Composing Processes in a Writing Situation What follows is a theoretical model of composing processes formulated on the basis of issues that student writers might address. No such model exists because we are all different, but the attempt here is to provide a model that can inform our individual processes and serve to generate productive discussion.