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Behavioral Differences Between Retyping, Drafting, and Editing: A Writing Process Analysis
Fred Steck et al., ETS Research Memorandum RM-18-06, Educational Testing Service, 2018
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- Researchers logged the keystrokes of 463 eighth-grade students who copied an article, drafted an essay and edited the essay. The three tasks produced very different keystroke patterns, which shows that the kind of writing changes how fast people type.
- How much weight it carries
- Research memorandum from a large testing organization, with a large sample. The students came from one school with lower socioeconomic status in the western United States, and the memorandum has not been through a journal review.
Facts taken from this source
- In an ETS study of eighth-grade students, copy typing was slower and had fewer long pauses than drafting.
“Copy typing was characterized by relatively slow typing, little time spent on long pause behaviors (except between words, when writers would have been scanning the text they were copying)” (Abstract)
- In the ETS study, drafting an essay was characterized by relatively fluent typing and significant backspacing.
“Drafting was characterized by relatively fluent typing, significant amounts of backspacing (reflecting false starts and sentence-level revision and editing)” (Abstract)
- The ETS study compared the writing of 463 eighth-grade students under three conditions.
“we contrast the writing behavior of 463 8th-grade students in a school with low socioecomonic status in the western U.S.” (Abstract)