I’ll do it may way: Three writers and their revision practices

Abstract

The diversity of students in today's classrooms has highlighted the need for teachers to recognize differences in the way students learn to write, as well as in the cultural and social experiences they bring to the learning situation. This article profiles three students and demonstrates how they constructed and revised their writing in different ways. The revision practices the author identified were deleting, substituting, adding text, and rewording or reorganizing text at the microlevel, as well as revising at the macrolevel (in which changes affected the meaning of the students' writing). Findings were surprising: Not only did the young writers compose and revise their texts in quite different ways (just as adult writers do), but they were aware of the metacognitive decisions they made and confidently explained and justified these decisions. Difference in revision practices was especially evident in the way the writers worked through the planning, drafting, and presenting phases of the writing process. Differences were also seen in the way the writers reworked transactional and poetic text. This reflected teacher pedagogy and also the writers' flexibility and desire to establish particular language meanings.