Abstract
As those of us who are over twenty-five and teach writing know, revision pedagogy has changed since the days when we were in school. Thanks to the research of Donald Murray, Nancy Sommers, Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, to name just a few, teachers no longer present revision simply as the mop-up operation that students must endure for not getting it right the first time. It is now rather conceived as a complex creative act that everyone must master, if, like the professionals, one wants to write really well. Yet in our newly-found enthusiasm for revision, we must deal with a few anomalies. First, although research shows that most good writers revise more extensively than poor writers, some revise little and still produce fine texts. Journalists, for example, frequently produce lucid first-draft articles, and even novelists occasionally write whole books with only minor revision. James Dickey may assume that the first fifty ways I try it are going to be wrong, but Zora Neale Hurston says she wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, a 286-page novel, in seven weeks with few changes.' Second, there are no uniform patterns that constitute expert revision. As Faigley and Witte pointed out in their recent study (Analyzing Revision), professional writers, dealing with the same topic under similar conditions, all revised in their own way: