Journal of Basic Writing A detailed case study of one basic writer reveals that her tendency to revise for surface features only, typical of many student writers, was encouraged by her teacher's being very focused and directive in written and oral comments on a draft. Mlynarczyk concludes that more open-ended comments addressed to essay content will best encourage substantive revision. 261 Sommers, Nancy. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. Revision is a recursive process essential to developing ideas, not merely the last stop in a train of writing tasks.
Students usually describe revision as choosing better words and eliminating repetition.
They revise to develop ideas only when redrafting the opening paragraph. Adults, on the other hand, usually describe revision as the process of finding the form of an argument and accommodating the audience. Adult writers are more likely to add or delete material and to rearrange sentences and paragraphs as they revise. Students in a twelfth-grade advanced composition class focused 81.7 percent of revisions on surface and stylistic changes and only 18.3 percent on more substantive structural and content changes. This occurred even though the class emphasized the writing process, requiring two drafts of each of ten papers, reviewed by peers and by the teacher, and providing class time for rewriting.