1. Chapter 3: Revision
Universidad del Turabo
Graduate Program
School of Education
Prepared by: Janette Bonilla
Education 704: Theory and Practice of
Teaching Writing
Prof. Philip Murray Finley

2. Agenda
• Definition of Revision
• History of Revision
• Revision Strategies of Student Writers
• Helping Students Revise Effectively
• Factors that inhibit or encourage meaningful
revision
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3. What is revision?
• Revision is the process of rereading a text to
make changes (in content, organization,
sentence structures, and word choice) to
improve it.
• According to Charles A. MacArthur: “When
writers revise, they have opportunities to think
about whether their text communicates
effectively to an audience, to improve the
quality of their prose, and even to reconsider
their content and perspective and potentially
transform their own understanding.".
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4. Older Concepts of
Revision
Aristotle
Middle Ages and Renaissance
Composing involved
finding and structuring 19th Century
content, then Emphasis in imitation
polishing the rather than invention.
Style separated from In United States, error
sentences. correction as a major
context.
emphasis in writing
Revision involved instruction initially
changes at sentence- arose more from
level. social conditions than
from the rhetorical
tradition.
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5. Contemporary Concepts
of Revision
Revision
Internal External
Revision Revision
Discovering and Proofreading that
shaping meaning, focused on
focusing on self- conventions of
expression and form, style,
developing a language , and
personal voice mechanics
New approach to revision according to Donald Murray
(1978).
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6. Revision Strategies of
Student Writers
• The complex cognitive processes involved in
revising, particularly at the rhetorical level,
explain the way student writers revise.
Superficial
changes in
their text
Student Small
Viewed as changes in
“punishment” Writers syntactic and
paragraph
Revision
Viewed as
error
corrections
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7. Helping Students Revise
Effectively
Using
Computers
Teachers
Peer can
Direct
Response encourage Instruction
Groups
students to
revise
Whole-Class
Workshop
and One-to-
One
Conferences
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8. Factors that inhibit or encourage
meaningful revision
Factors that inhibit Factors that encourage
meaningful revision meaningful revision
• Receive no evaluation or self- • Effective comments on
evaluation forms students' drafts, helping them
• Teacher comments focusing to become independent reviser
on sentence-level correctness • Writers must detect a problem,
• Peer comments that do not diagnose the problem, and
identify weakness in a text modify the text to remedy the
and suggest alternatives problem
• Genre instruction and learning
to evaluate these genres
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9. How would you explain?
• Meaning of revision
• Old and contemporary concept of revision
• Ways the student writers revise
• Ways teachers can help students revise
effectively
• Factors that encourage meaningful revision
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10. References
Clark, I. L. (2012). Concepts in composition: Theory
and practice in the teaching of writing (2nd ed.).
New York, NY: Routledge.
Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.).
(2007). Best practices in writing
instruction (Vol. 1). Guilford Press.
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