Revision Practices: Response to Dix

One of the things I appreciated about this article is how Dix reminds us of how complex revision is, particularly at the transactional level. Intentionality of a writer to "reflect, compare, evaluate, identify deficiencies, generate possibilities and then revise" reflects the intense cognitive nature of writing. Again, Dix points to the recursive rather than linear process that fluent writers use. Finally, transactional writing requires metacognition, a concept that requires educators to teach students how to become aware of their own thinking in terms of composition. When I work with my students, I teach them that revision is the intentional changing of the words or word order(not merely at the syntactical level) to influence meaning.