Within Cegep classes (17 to 20 years of age) reserved for students having previously failed a literature course, we examined the impact of a rewriting activity on the development of students’ writing skills and their representation of the writing process. This activity was designed to encourage students to reflect on difficulties in their writing in response to individual written feedback provided by a researcher following their first draft. The results of this study show that students’ approach to revising was largely limited to the editing of words and sentence structure. To illustrate this, we discuss two typical cases: the first features a student who has difficulty correcting surface errors through the application of basic rules of language usage; the second focuses on a student whose text production process is limited to a single draft, thus excluding recourse to subsequent planning or revising.