Blog 21: What I Worked on in Class

There Needs to be a Revision in How Revision is Taught to Students

            According to The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, revision in writing is defined as, “the process of amending an earlier version, published or unpublished, of a work,” (Baldick). The importance of a student revising his or her own piece of writing is commonly taught in high school English classes. However, is this vital lesson actually getting through to the students? Is there a further need to change the education of revision to students so that they will be able to revise more effectively? I have reviewed the findings by Debra Myhill and Susan Jones in their article titled “More Than Just Error Correction: Students’ Perspectives on Their Revision Processes During Writing,” which is about students’ viewpoints of revision. Where previous studies have simply explored the processes of student revision, due to the information I have gathered, I will emphasize the need for an alteration in the way revision is taught to students. Myhill and Jones interviewed multiple secondary school students from England, while I interviewed one college student from the United States. In addition, while I support their thoughts on a change in writing education, I want to use my data to show how their hypothesis is supported. Moreover, in my study, my primary mode of considering will be through discourse analysis.