Is Revision Separate from Writing?

Revision as Writing

In thinking and writing about groups working on revising a document, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “revision” may be an artificial separation. There is a substantial, though not insurmountable, body of research that indicates revision is indeed something different than writing, or that revision is at least something which it is possible to distinguish from writing even if it is not separable from writing.

Haar (2006) claims that revision “doesn’t have a well-developed history of theorizing and study” (3). I might suggest that revision doesn’t have a body of study or academic theoretical framework because it’s so very difficult to separate revision from simply writing. I cannot imagine any circumstance under which I would write without some modification of the text—spelling, organization, word choice, rhetorical strategy—before the text hits the screen. My son, all of 8 years old, is at the beginning stages of writing. He prints letters, frequently not distinguishing between lower- and upper-case into words, and makes sentences of those words. But he’s already revising in his head before he begins printing. He speaks softly, mouthing the words to himself, making corrections and emendations, before beginning to write. And as he writes, he makes little corrections (rounding out a “c,” perhaps, or getting the downward stroke on the correct side of a “d”). Those physical corrections, of course, are simply the end result of the revision process already in place in his head. His writing, in fact, is indistinguishable from his revision. They are coterminous, sharing the leading edge of his thought plane.

But as important as writing is, it seems foolish for me to simply dismiss revision as the focus of serious study. For one thing, writing, and any aspect of writing we care to identify, is simply too important to ignore. That argument has been made too many times by too many people for me to go into it here. Suffice to say that writing’s important; therefore, research into revision must also be important. Haar indeed states that that “revision touches every part of the writing process” (7), and then goes into various academic definitions of revision, some focusing on the time scale during which revision happens, others identifying the mechanical aspects of revision (proofreading as opposed to organization, for instance). Haar provides us with examples of “deliberately wrought” (11) descriptions of revision offered by revision scholars, ranging from metaphorical (“internal” and “external,” “up” and “down,” revising “out” and “in”), cognitive (“a turn, a change of direction or attention, a step, a transformation from a writer-centered to a reader-centered mode of writing,” according to Flower), duration (“quick” and “thorough,” according to Elbow), and a literal definition by Fitzgerald that says “revision means making any changes at any point in the writing process.” Fitzgerald’s distinction seems to me to be the least helpful. Writing itself is, for me at least, an act of change, the most insignificant portion of which takes place on the screen and the most profound of which takes place within myself or my readers. In other words, I’m not sure but what revision is so closely related to writing that distinguishing between the two is simply an academic exercise.

Fortunately, I’m in the business of academic exercises.

And separating revision from writing does indeed allow for some advantages: for one thing, the perception that revision is different than producing, say, a rough draft, is helpful in locating a particular event or process to investigate. Another advantage to separating revision from writing is that revision is almost always in response to your audience, whether you are serving as your own audience (and editor) or whether you are revision in response to someone else’s input, revision is a response to the reader. For my purposes, the group action—two or more people changing a workplace document—is important in that group revision and peer review have become more important to composition theory in the last ten years as we see the de-emphasis on the individual as author and the emergence of recognition that writing is the result of living and working with others—friction, if you will, which is both positive and negative. There never was an author who wrote out of a vacuum, creating something from nothing (no matter how long it’s taking that idea to die, it was never true). But the teaching of revision in TC service courses (and I think we could expand this to freshman comp, too, as well as others) is still often a limited-interaction exercise.

I’ve received some very good, thoughtful responses from posting the following query to the ATTW-L:

I'm interested in knowing how group revision activities (two or more writers working on the same document) are conducted in your department's TC service courses. What sorts of genres, activities, and technologies are included when teaching/allowing students to revise a document in groups? How is authorship represented in the final document, and what roles do the students play when revising in groups?


The reason I ask is that my dissertation deals with service courses, and my preliminary research indicates that group revision may look and be conducted much differently in the workplace (specifically, engineering firms) than in the classroom. I am looking for more evidence of the classroom experience of document revision.


Any information or thoughts you have will be greatly appreciated, on- or off-list! Of course, I'll be happy to share my findings.

The responses I’ve received so far indicate that much of the peer review that takes place in TC service courses can be described as “asynchronous” (groups actually working as individuals and supplying critiques to other individuals) and somewhat mono-technological (MS Word shows up quite a bit; email somewhat less; Drupal only once, and no other technologies listed).

But the preliminary information I’ve received from civil engineers answering basically the same questions is that group revision is frequently an activity wherein the group offers feedback as a group: in other words, everyone talks about what needs to happen as a group rather than as individuals working silently. Furthermore, there’s a wide range of technologies that gets used for this revision process: Google Docs, Google Sketchup, paper, Words, and PDF docs.

So, as Rich Rice pointed out the other night, the real value of my dissertation will be to figure out how service courses get their information about group revision, and to then suggest a process by which service courses could get more accurate and timely information about workplace writing (in other words, try to offer some solution).