Revision in the Context of Different Drafting Strategies

Abstract

Our position in this chapter is that revision cannot be understood independently of the writing strategies in which it is embedded. Some authors have promoted an interactive writing strategy (e.g., Elbow, 1998) which relies on multiple rewriting as a means of developing text content in lieu of producing a structured outline. Galbraith’s (1999) dual-process model, which describes writing processes as an interleaving of dispositional content generation and rhetorical structuring, provides some basis for understanding why this kind of strategy might be successful. We review existing research exploring the efficacy of outlining and rough-drafting strategies. This suggests a clear benefit for outline-based strategies over various forms of rough-drafting strategies, but has not, we argue, included an appropriate form of interactive writing strategy. We then discuss research exploring the writing processes of writers performing non-laboratory real-world writing tasks and find that a minority of writers, and particularly more experienced writers, appear to habitually adopt a nonutline multiple-drafting strategy similar in form to that specified by the dual-process model. Finally, we describe an experiment in which we found (a) that this form of interactive strategy was more effective than the forms of rough drafting strategy which have been investigated in previous research, (b) that, consistent with previous research, outlining also has clear text-quality advantages, and (c) that the effectiveness of revision depends on the form of initial draft to which it is applied.