The Editing Process in Writing: A Performance Study of More Skilled and Less Skilled College Writers

Two groups of college writers (more skilled and less skilled editors) corrected and commented upon the sentence-level errors in two tasks (a selfwritten essay and three essays written by others), under two conditions (no feedback and feedback on location of error). Analyses of students' corrections showed that, while the more skilled writers almost always corrected more errors than the less skilled, the two groups performed similarly on the self-written essays where neither corrected many errors at all. Both groups performed better on the standard essays and better with feedback. Analyses of students' protocols showed that three strategies which were used for correcting errors (consulting, intuiting, and comprehending) varied with task and condition. Error in writing has been a sore topic for a long time. Over a hundred years ago, Harvard President Charles W. Eliot complained that "bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, [and] ignorance of the simplest rules ... of punctuation are far from rare among young men of eighteen" (Cited in Hook, 1979, p.8). More recent complaints take a different tack, focussing most often on the unprofitability of too great a concern for correctness, particularly when such a concern involves the teaching of grammar and an attendant neglect of the teaching of composition skills (see, for example, Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, & Schoer, 1963; Petrosky, 1977; Perl, 1979; Ponsot & Deen, 1982). Such complaints serve the good purpose of broadening conceptions of what should be taught in the name of writing. At the same time, we know that some writers have great difficulty with sentence-level error, difficulty which does not go away by itself and which needs the attention of teachers and researchers. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (1980), for example, has identified two distinct populations of seventeen-year-olds based on an analysis of writing mechanics: one which "appears to have a general, though imperfect, grasp of written language" and another which "appears to be virtually lost" (p. 44). The most convincing demonstration of the difficulty that basic writers have with error is Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations (1977). This This research was carried out at the University of Pittsburgh as a doctoral thesis under the direction of William L. Smith. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 21, No. 1, February 1987 8 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.65 on Wed, 06 Jul 2016 05:17:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Editing Process in Writing 9 rich interpretive taxonomy has little to do with giving students up for lost, however, for Shaughnessy was interested in allowing researchers and teachers to see that there are other causes for error in writing besides ignorance and carelessness. Like researchers studying child language acquisition and second language learning, she, and Kroll and Schafer (1978) after her, demonstrated that one can identify patterns of error which often reveal the consistent application of erroneous rules or buggy procedures and which imply faulty logic and misconceptions but a logic and an intention nonetheless. They showed, then, that the processes of making errors and learning to correct them can be interpreted within a theory of how language learning occurs. This kind of research gave teachers a new perspective on error, for it pointed the way to cognitive diagnosis: examine a text, talk to a student, determine the reason for a type of error. (But see Ney, 1986, for a critique of this approach.) It also gave researchers a new agenda: using errors to understand the development of and constraints on writing ability. Some scholarship on error in the writing of young adults has followed Shaughnessy's lead, taking as its aim to trace errors to their sources, with oral language being a predominant candidate. (See, for example, Epes, 1985, and the review by Morrow, 1985.) Other researchers have located the sources of sentence-level error in the limits of the human information-processing system. Most notably, Daiute's (1981) work demonstrates how constraints imposed by short term memory may lead to errors and also impede error detection and correction. Others have been interested in characterizing the editing process, taking as their purpose to provide a description of what happens after a student makes an error and returns to his or her text as an editor in order to detect and correct it. Bartholomae's (1980) case study of an inexperienced editor is an example of this research direction, as is the work of Lees (in press). The attitudes that inform this current research on error thus differ both from the traditional impatience with errorful writing and the more recent tendency to minimize its relative importance and thereby its gravity.