this is from nancy sommers revision strategies of students writers

382CONGER ComPORTION THE COMMUNICATIONtheir writing: that the meaning to be communicated is already there, alreadyfinished, already produced, ready to be communicated, and all that is necessary is a better word “rightly worded.” One student defined revision as “re-doing”; “redoing” meant “just using better words and eliminating words thatare not needed.” For the students, writing is translating: the thought to thepage, the language of speech to the more formal language of prose, the wordto its synonym. Whatever is translated, an original text already exists forstudents, one which need not be discovered or acted upon, but simply com-municared.7The students list repetition as one of the elements they most worry about.This cue signals to them that they need to eliminate the repetition either bysubstituting or deleting words or phrases. Repetition occurs, in large part,because student writing imitates-transcribes-speech: attention to repeti-tious words is a manner of cleaning speech. Without a sense of the develop-mental possibilities of revision (and writing in general) students seek, on theauthority of many textbooks, simply to clean up their language and prepareto type. What is curious, however, is that students are aware of lexical repeti-tion, but not conceptual repetition. They only notice the repetition if theycan “hear” it; they do not diagnose lexical repetition as symptomatic of prob-lems on a deeper level. By rewording their sentences to avoid the lexicalrepetition, the students solve the immediate problem, but blind themselvesto problems on a textual level; although they are using different words, theyare sometimes merely restating the same idea with different words. Suchblindness, as I discovered with student writers, is the inability to “see” revi-sion as a process: the inability to “re-view” their work again, as it were, withdifferent eyes, and to start over.The revision strategies described above are consistent with the students’understanding of the revision process as requiring lexical changes but notsemantic changes. For the students, the extent to which they revise is a func-tion of their level of inspiration. In fact, they use the word inspiration todescribe the ease or difficulty with which their essay is written, and the ex-tent to which the essay needs to be revised. If students feel inspired, if thewriting comes easily, and if they don’t get stuck on individual words orphrases, then they say that they cannot see any reason to revise. Becausestudents do not see revision as an activity in which they modify and developperspectives and ideas, they feel that if they know what they want to say,then there is little reason for making revisions.The only modification of ideas in the students’ essays occurred when theytried out two or three introductory paragraphs. This results, in part, becausethe students have been taught in another version of the linear model of com-posing to use a thesis statement as a controlling device in their introductoryparagraphs. Since they write their introductions and their thesis statementseven before they have really discovered what they want to say, their earlyclose attention to the thesis statement, and more generally the linear model,