"Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" by Nancy Sommers

The author’s intent in the article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” by Nancy Sommers is to show the reader the difference between revision approaches in student and experience writers and how these different approaches shape writing revision.

Nancy Sommers conducted a series of studies over three years in which she studied revision processes of student and experienced writers to see their methods of revision during their writing process (Sommers, 1980). The study included twenty freshmen from Boston University and the University of Oklahoma with SAT verbal scores from 450-600. Also included twenty experienced writers, including editors and journalists. The examination consisted of writing three essays each (twice) with a total of nine essays. These essays were analyzed and categorized identifying different revision operations.

Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering. Also four levels of changes were identified: word, phrase, sentence, and theme. These methods were the most common among the writers as processes for revision. In “conceptual repetition” (Sommers, 1980), the idea of a sentence or paragraph is repeated even if the student is aware of word repetition. Substituting words or phrases might fix a superficial issue, but it does not fix a repetitive concept or idea.

On the other hand, experienced writers described their revision process as cyclical steps. Their process involves many revision drafts where their focus is to find the main idea and elaborate after a series of addition and deletion of ideas, whether it might be a sentence or a whole paragraph.

Along the course of the author’s work, the definition of revision is redefined “as a sequence of changes in a composition – changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work.” (Sommers, 1980) Revision is not supposed to be a set of vocabulary equivalence or substitution but it should be an exploration of ideas that define the main point of a work while rewriting drafts.

The understanding of revision allows writers to focus on the idea of the work, elaborate those ideas, and find a position for their work. The author expresses common errors in student’s revision and presumes that these suggestions will improve their writing. These suggestions apply to current class work to help define your peer’s ideas not to grammatically dissect the work.

Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. College Composition and Communication , 31 (4), 378-388.