Written Communication Jan 2011

Investigating Instruction for Improving Revision of Argumentative Essays

Jodie A. Butler Northern Illinois University ; M. Anne Britt Northern Illinois University

Abstract

Students are expected to come into the current college classroom already possessing certain skills including the ability to write at the appropriate academic level regardless of discipline and the ability to create well-structured arguments. Research indicates, however, that most students entering college are underprepared in both areas. One strategy that may help students write at a more academic level is teaching students to focus on spending their time on revision. In the current study, we examine two potential sources of difficulty in the revision of argumentative essays: a poorly developed argument schema and a poorly developed global revision task schema. We created and tested the effectiveness of two written tutorials designed to provide college students information to saturate their knowledge base as well as provide them with procedural tasks to complete. We found that without instruction, students focused their revisions on making local wording changes that did not qualitatively improve their essays. An argument tutorial helped students make higher level global changes, include more argument content, and improve the structure of the essay. A global revision tutorial also helped students make more substantive structural changes. Thus, both tutorials helped students improve their revisions, and the tutorials were completed independently by the students successfully.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2011-01-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088310387891
CompPile
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
teacher development revision
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (10)

  1. Cheng et al. (2025)
    A mixed-methods approach to English-L1 teachers’ implementation of written feed…
    Assessing Writing
  2. Li (2025)
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  3. Cui et al. (2023)
    Developing EFL teachers’ feedback literacy for research and publication purpose…
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  4. Backman et al. (2023)
    Beyond Structure: Using the Rational Force Model to Assess Argumentative Writing
    Written Communication
  5. McCarthy et al. (2022)
    Automated writing evaluation: Does spelling and grammar feedback support high-q…
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Show all 10 →
  1. Chen et al. (2019)
    Assessing student-writers’ self-efficacy beliefs about text revision in EFL writing
    Assessing Writing
  2. Holcomb et al. (2018)
    First-Year Composition as “Big Data”: Towards Examining Student Revisions at Scale
    Computers and Composition
  3. Abdollahzadeh et al. (2017)
    Argumentative Writing Behavior of Graduate EFL Learners
    Argumentation
  4. Johnson et al. (2017)
    College student perceptions of writing errors, text quality, and author charact…
    Assessing Writing
  5. Kuhn et al. (2016)
    Tracing the Development of Argumentive Writing in a Discourse-Rich Context
    Written Communication

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