Abstract:

Participants in this study were asked to write and modify their articles in two stages. This study was to investigate the effect of this experimental treatment on participants’ writing. To avoid the influence of the participant’s individual difference and its effect on the experimental treatment, this study adopted the repeated measure design. The participants included a class of 23 sixth-grade students from an elementary school in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. In the pre-treatment stage, students wrote two articles and made their own modifications and later they entered the experimental treatment stage (including two stages of revising and editing). In the revising stage, students participated in revising groups where they provided feedback to classmates about how to improve their drafts. In the editing stage, students proofread their own compositions by locating and marking possible errors. In this study, while students' previous writing skills and experimental measurement phases were independent variables, the modifying amount, the length, and the writing quality of articles were dependent variables. The obtained data were analyzed by two-way ANOVA mixed design. The findings were as follows. First, there was no interaction between “writing skills” and “experimental measurement phases” on all dependent variables. In other words, there was a positive effect in the two-stage revision among students with high and low writing skills. Secondly, compared to the draft of the third article, the revised and edited third article were significantly more in amount of adding, deleting, supplement, and refinement, but not significantly different on moving text from one place to another. In addition, the revised third article was significantly more than the edited third article in amount of deleting and refinement, but not on adding and supplement. Third, the length of the edited third article was significantly longer than the first article, the second article, and the draft and revised of the third article. Besides, the revised third article was longer than the first article and the second article. Fourthly, compared to the first, second article, and draft of the third article, the revised and edited third articles were significantly better in text rhetoric, ideological content, organizational structure, and overall quality. Furthermore, the edited third article was significantly better than the revised third article in text rhetoric and overall quality.

Keywords:

editing, revising, writing, writing quality