Implications

Rather than attempting to describe, more or less accurately, some “core” experience of revising, these metaphorical stories structure different aspects of revising activities. And in so doing, they challenge our present classification of various activities as “revision.” Essentially, we tend to lump together as revision a variety of processes that have little more in common than their timing—they occur after some set of initial decisions, statements, efforts at text. To divide revising into two processes, first revising or rewriting and then editing, is still problematic: Depending on definitions, it may further emphasize time as the essential factor in classifying revising activities, may focus only on the broadest of the contrasts that the metaphorical stories suggest (major reformulation versus surface details), and may not be in agreement with emerging research evidence about what writers actually do when they revise. To divide revising activities by the nature of the specific act (addition, deletion, and so on) will likely prove more useful in analyzing revising activities, but such classification does not provide insight into the writer’s intent in completing such an act. To divide revising activities, as Donald Murray (1978) does, into “internal” and “external” revision (respectively focused on developing one’s own understanding of one’s meaning and on conveying that meaning to others) does focus, to some degree, on the writer’s intent and understanding of the text, but such classification does not consider the specific acts of revision that may serve the function of internal and external revision. The metaphorical stories that I have discussed here tend to classify revising activities along several dimensions at the same time—dimensions that include the above classifications, but also add to them writers’ perceptions’ of the text and its needs, their purposes in making a revision, the difficulty required to complete the revising act, their sense of the “feel” of the process, and so forth. As we learn more about revising and how we can describe it, we may find that such metaphorical stories suggest fruitful ways both to complicate and to make coherent our classification of revising activities.