First-Year Composition as “Big Data”: Towards Examining Student Revisions at Scale

Given the central role revision plays in our First-Year Composition (FYC) program and the enormous number of papers students produce each semester across all course sections, we approached student revision as a “big data” phenomenon, assembling a large corpus of student papers and developing software to process them. Unlike past studies of revision which found that students focus almost exclusively on minor edits and surface errors, we found that student revisions primarily involve deleting and, more frequently, inserting complete sentences. After describing our software and reviewing its results, we examine several situational variables that may influence this unanticipated practice, and discuss ways to integrate revision more fully into the writing classroom.