NANCY SOMMERS: If you think about the word revision, it is re-seeing. It's re-envisioning something. It is being able to see again something we didn't see the first time.

MARK HERRERA: I don't revise. I'm a bad example of writing papers, I believe.

MARK STEMEN: Mark has trouble sometimes because I think he doesn't want to revise. He just wants to turn in his first draft.

MARK HERRERA: The teacher's always tell me to revise papers. But I do pretty well on them, so I don't really need to take that extra time.

MARK STEMEN: He's got such incredible passion that that passion comes through. But I think what he often finds is that writing makes him dispassionate, and that's not the case. You can be even more passionate in your writing as you polish and hone those skills. This idea that you can just do it on the first draft, sure, but you're only getting part of it. What you really want to do is practice and put forward your best words in the best situations and know that they're the best words.

I mean, many times you think about, you know, dancing. You've got to know your dance moves. You've got to know your word moves. And if you start polishing those and practicing those, when you bust those out, it's a whole different story.

NANCY SOMMERS: Revision is the opportunity to be able to see one's words and work with one's words and to get feedback from others and to have the distance between the time we wrote the first draft and future drafts that gives us perspectives. And those perspectives are quite valuable for writing.