Revision: In the Writer's Workshop and in the Classroom

Abstract

In an attempt to explore the revision process, the Journal of Education invited a writer, who is also a researcher into the writing process, to keep a journal while he was revising a novel and several pieces of nonfiction. We also invited a researcher into the writing process, who is also a writer, to comment on the writer's journal and to point out the classroom implications of the writer's testimony. The writer is Donald Murray, a Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. During the period when he kept this journal September 19, 1979 to December 8, 1979 he revised a novel of more than 300 manuscript pages and revised four pieces of nonfiction. Donald Graves, the researcher, is Associate Professor of Education at the University of New Hampshire and Director of the Writing Process Laboratory. He is now working full time on an NIE-funded study of the writing processes of six-, seven-, eight-, and nine-year-old children. Through the direct observation of children with video and hand recordings, he and his two research associates, Susan Sowers and Lucy Calkins, are completing the second year of daily observation of sixteen children as they write, and collecting large group data from children in nine different classrooms in the same two year period.