Composition scholar Nancy Sommers investigates the writing processes of students, and her extensive studies document what we have experienced whenever we have assigned writing: students do not revise their work. Indeed, Sommers demonstrates: inexperienced student writers do not even have a concept of revision that is separate from editing or changing words around. This notion is in marked contrast to the experienced writers she studied—who viewed revision as the greater part of writing, as the process of discovering meaning, finding an argument, and determining effective rhetorical methods for communicating their ideas. WIP faculty, as experienced writers, know that revising work—before and after submission for publication—is the process of writing. Our students, however, believe that writing is drafting material, most likely in the wee hours of the night before an assignment is due.
A broad concept of revision as the over-arching process of effective writing—and an emphasis on global as opposed to local revision—is vital to writing-intensive pedagogy. Revision is the main process of writing effectively because it entails multiple processes of planning, drafting, and rethinking ideas in writing over time. Students, who think that “revising” means plugging in a few big words (often with unfortunate consequences) or running the “spell-check” program, need to be educated in the process of revision as a global “re-seeing” that comes from revisiting ideas over time and with new information that is learned as it emerges in the writing process. Writing, as we know, not only helps us to see what we think, but it also helps us to “see.” Revising as re-seeing, not simply re-writing by changing a few words, intensifies the insight process. (This is not to say that sentence-level revision is not important. But such revision is best addressed as latter-stage revisions, which you’ll turn to when development and organization problems are solved.)
To teach revision means to break students of the one-draft, no revising habits and to intensify their engagement with the writing process, so that they are involved long enough and deeply enough for their best ideas to develop.