BETTER REVISION IN 8 MINUTES - PROMPTING FIRST-YEAR COLLEGE WRITERS TO REVISE GLOBALLY

Two experiments examined the relation between revision and task defini tion among college students in writing courses. In Experiment 1, stude nts prompted to make global revisions to their drafts of college appli cation letters improved their drafts more than students not prompted t o make global revisions. Results of Experiment 1 extended results of D . L. Wallace and J. R. Hayes (1991), who found the same effect for stu dents revising text they had not written. In Experiment 2, the treatme nt did not improve revisions by college students (identified as measur ed by low SAT verbal scores) who completed the same writing task. Toge ther, results of these 2 experiments suggest that the prompt to revise globally may be effective in helping entry-level college writing stud ents improve their texts (the prompt seems to have encouraged them to make better revisions) but that it is not effective in helping basic-l evel college writing students revise.