Revision Beyond the Copyedit: Encouraging Students to Reorganize, Restructure, and Refocus in Writing Assignments

Effective writing rarely appears in the first draft. Scaffolding a project with intermediate checkpoints for instructor or peer feedback can help students experience the revision process, but students may still struggle with the idea of a “serious” revision that goes beyond copyediting. Just like the writing process, the revision process can be daunting. By helping students through a sequence of targeted revision strategies, they can tackle different parts at a time and catch different weaknesses on different passes through a document. This paper provides targeted revision strategies that can support students as they write final reports that have gone through meaningful revision including reorganization, a restructure or further development of a statistical argument, and a refocusing based on intended audience.