Better Revision in Eight Minutes? Prompting First-Year College Writers to Revise Globally

Two experiments examined the relation between revision and task definition among college students in writing courses. In Experiment 1, students prompted to make global revisions to their drafts of college application letters improved their drafts more than students not prompted to make global revisions. Results of Experiment 1 extended results of D. L. Wallace and J. R. Hayes (1991), who found the same effect for students revising text they had not written. In Experiment 2, the treatment did not improve revisions by college students (identified as measured by low SAT verbal scores) who completed the same writing task. Together, results of these 2 experiments suggest that the prompt to revise globally may be effective in helping entry-level college writing students improve their texts (the prompt seems to have encouraged them to make better revisions) but that it is not effective in helping basic-level college writing students revise.