Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers

Although various aspects of the writing process have been studied extensively of late, research on revision has been notably absent. The reason for this, I suspect, is that current models of the writing process have directed attention away revision. With few exceptions, these models are linear; they separate the writing process into discrete stages. Two representative models are Gordon Rohman's suggestion that the composing process moves prewriting to writing to rewriting and James Britton's of the writing process as a series of stages described in metaphors of growth, conception-incubation-production.1 What is striking about these theories of writing is that they themselves on speech: Rohman defines the writer in a way that cannot distinguish him a speaker (A writer is a man who ... puts his experience into in his own mind-p. 15); and Britton bases his theory of writing on what he calls (following Jakobson) the expressiveness of speech.2 Moreover, Britton's study itself follows the linear model of the relation of thought and language in speech proposed by Vygotsky, a relationship embodied in the movement from the motive which engenders a thought to the shaping of the thought, first in inner speech, then in meanings of words, and finally in words (quoted in Britton, p. 40). What this movement fails to take into account in its structurefirst ... then . . . finally-is the recursive shaping of thought by language; what it fails to take into account is revision. In these conceptions of the writing process revision is understood as a separate stage at the end of the process-a stage that comes after the completion of a first or second draft and one that is temporally distinct the prewriting and writing stages of the process.3 The bases itself on speech in two specific ways. First of all, it is based on traditional rhetorical models, models that were created to serve the spoken art of oratory. In whatever ways the parts of classical rhetoric are