Re-vising and re-visioning

I just re-read Nancy Sommers’ Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers in which she examined the revisions of college freshman and their perceptions of those revisions with those of experienced, professional writers on a variety of essays. In her research, Sommers identified four levels of revision changes: “word, phrase, sentence, theme” (pg. 380). While experienced writers showed changes at all four levels, the student writers focused more on word and phrase changes when revising their work.

This is something that I struggle with myself, even as an experienced writer. I often find that I have to walk away from a piece of writing for a day or two before I can see past sentence level errors to more structural problems. If this is something that even experienced writers struggle with, how can we help students along their journey to becoming experienced writers? Also, is it fair or realistic to expect student writers to do more systemic corrections, to in fact re-vision their work?