Your student hands in a piece of writing that simply is not adequate. You do them a favor by asking for a revision rather than failing the paper. Next week you get essentially the same paper, with some of the spelling errors gone. The student is confident that she’s done what you wanted. Perhaps she’s even taken it to a writing tutor. But it’s still a failing paper.

This frustrating scenario plays out over and over again because instructors and students understand “revision” very differently. If you have written long, complicated scholarly work, you know what revision means. You’ve written many drafts. You’ve thought whole pages were awful and unclear, and you threw them out and started over. You did more research, and incorporated an entirely new viewpoint into your argument. You had a discussion with someone else in your field, and you changed your mind about some things, so you rewrote. Entering students often don’t even proofread their work after they print it out. It may have been a huge effort to get their words on paper, and they feel relieved, if not entirely satisfied, to get to the end of the assignment. Therefore, if the student does as much as runs spell check on their paper, they might consider it “revised.” So what can you do?

Give a before-and-after example of a revised paper.
If students truly don’t know what revision means, you may have to show them.

Define your terms.
Explain what proofreading is. Students probably know what this is, even if they don’t seem to do it. Here you might also explain what spell check does and doesn’t do. Explain what editing is: cleaning up sentence-level errors, adding or deleting sentences, changing things around to make the meaning clear. Then move on to revision: thinking through the argument again, adding or deleting large chunks of material, incorporating more research, etc. If students can see proofreading, editing, and revising as three different operations, they will have a better grasp of what kind of work you want them to do.

Target your comments on the paper towards revision, not editing.
If you have lots of comments on the paper, some geared towards comma usage and some geared towards the consistency of the argument, the student often doesn’t have a clear idea of what is more important. For the student, it’s easier and more concrete work to clean up the commas. So have your comments suggest a couple of main goals for revision. Address the editing concerns separately, as something the student needs to do as well, but maybe after the revising work.

For an excellent example of revision-oriented comments on a student paper, see this excerpt from Engaging Ideas, by John C. Bean.  Revision-oriented comments

Dispel the myth that only bad writers need to revise.
Good writers struggle with their work just as much or more than bad writers. Good writing has to be built and crafted. It’s only luck if the first draft comes out right. Your students might feel ashamed or stigmatized if they have to keep working on something. Explain that revising is a normal part of the writing process, and not extra work you are punishing them with.