READING TO REVISE: TOWARD A MODEL OF HOW AND WHY FRESHMEN READ TO REVISE THEIR OWN DRAFTS (WRITING, SCHEMA, COMPOSITION, EGOCENTRISM)

One unanswered question in the study of revision is how and why freshmen read their rough drafts while revising. This study attempts to answer this question and formulate a model of how freshmen read their own drafts through a case study of six second semester freshmen with some experience revising drafts. The student writers were asked to compose outloud as they revised their rough draft until they believed their paper to be finished; they were asked, as well, to record their responses to a control draft written by another student. All student writers were interviewed after they completed their final draft. The responses student writers made while revising were coded according to a topology developed for this study that categorized responses according to the size of the text concerned, the object of concern, whether a potential reader was considered, and the affect of the response; these categorized responses were broken down into percentages of the total number of responses for each student.;Only one of the student writers was inclined to explicitly direct her revision toward the needs or possible responses of readers. Of the six students, only one student writer explicitly tested the truth of the claims he makes in his draft or the plausibility of his argument. Though these two findings would sugest that a form of egocentrism is interfering in the revision process, the interviews and other data seems to indicate that egocentrism can only be a suitable explanation in a weakened form.;The study found that it is productive to distinguish between constructive revisers, who see their drafts as resources and revise from the meaning they wish to make, and reactive revisers, who see their drafts as approximations of a final draft and who revise to improve their extant draft. Constructive revisers tend to direct their attention to larger units of text and be more concerned with the argument of their developing text. Reactive revisers tend to restrict their attention to units of text at or below the sentence level and be more concerned with the clarity or correctness of their text.