An insight to be drawn from the writing problems of Harvard University (Massachusetts) students enrolled in a "basic writing" course is that the kinds of problems the students had were different in degree, but not in kind, from problems of less accomplished student writers elsewhere and from those all student writers have from time to…

A case study of a novice poet based on six interviews reveals significant differences in the writing processes of beginning and experienced poets. While the novice's unfamiliarity with other poets' work or methods of working and his own practice of writing only when he spontaneously finds himself in a certain mood distinguished him as a beginner,…

Poets' working drafts and their comments on their processes indicate overwhelmingly that they, like experienced writers of other genres, are extensive revisers. The biggest difficulty with the term "revising" is that it designates both the changes made to a text and the mental processes and attitudes that underlie these changes. Even the…