In "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers," Nancy Sommers uses a case study to show what student writers and experienced writers do when they write and then revise. Twenty freshman from Boston University and the University of Oklahoma (the student writers) and twenty experienced adult writers from the same areas each wrote three essays. They rewrote each essay twice. Their writing and revising strategies were then analyzed.
The study found that student writers do not have the strategies for dealing with the whole essay. The student writers do not use the terms "revision" or "rewriting." They explained that "revision was not a word they used, but the word their teacher used" (78). There is more concentration on the words and vocabulary instead of the ideas. When revising, the students scratch out and do over, review, re-do, and slash and throw out words. Cleaning up speech was a main concern because "unlike speech, writing can be re-read," and students do not want to be repetitive (78). Substituting or deleting words eliminates repetition, but the students do not change any problems with their ideas. Student writers also use their thesis as a control. This restricts them while they are developing their ideas and also makes it hard to change some of their ideas. They stop revising when they "have not violated any of the rules for revising" (80). They concentrate more on the rules rather than their ideas. The strategies used by the students are based on what their former teachers taught them. They did not learn the skills for revising. .
The experienced writers have a different outlook on revising. Revising was defined using the terms "rewriting" and "revising". Experienced writers see revising as a process with many steps. Each step has a different objective. The main objective for experienced writers is finding the "form or shape of their argument" (81). Expressions like finding "a pattern" or "a design" were used (81).