The study of revision has been a topic of interest in writing research over the past decades. Numerous studies have, for instance, shown that learning-to-revise is one of the key competences in writing development. Moreover, several models of revision have been developed, and a variety of taxonomies have been used to measure revision in empirical studies. Current advances in data collection and analysis have made it possible to study revision in increasingly precise detail. The present study aimed to combine previous models and current advances by providing a comprehensive product- and process-oriented tagset of revision. The presented tagset includes properties of external revisions: trigger, orientation, evaluation, action, linguistic domain, spatial location, temporal location, duration, and sequencing. We identified how keystroke logging, screen replays, and eye tracking can be used to extract both manually and automatically extract features related to these properties. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate how this tagset can be used to annotate revisions made by higher education students in various academic tasks. To conclude, we discuss how this tagset forms a scalable basis for studying revision in writing in depth.

Spontaneous writing observed in chats, instant messengers, and social media has become established as productive modes of communication and discourse genres. However, they remain understudied from the perspective of writing process research. In this paper, we present an empirical study wherein keystrokes made by chat users in a game were recorded. The distributions of the inter-key intervals were analyzed and fitted with ex-Gaussian distribution equation, and an argument for psycholinguistic interpretation of the distribution parameters is presented. This analysis leads to establishing a threshold of 500 ms for the identification of pauses in spontaneous writing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that pauses longer than 1.2 s may correspond to higher-level linguistic processing beyond a single propositional expression (functional element of the discourse).