Writing: Promoting Effective Revising and Editing

Writing is a powerful process for students as it encourages them to clarify their thinking and to organize and express their thoughts and feelings. A key stage of effective writing is revising and editing in order to ensure that the text’s message is clear and polished. During my experiences as a volunteer in various elementary school classrooms, I have noticed that it is common for students to struggle with editing and revising their work. This blog post will consider different strategies and resources for helping students to become effective revisers and editors of their writing. While revising and editing are important skills for all students, the strategies in this blog post are particularly beneficial for students in Grades 4-8.


Understanding the Difference between Revising and Editing

Teachers Pay Teachers.

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In 4 Strategies for Teaching Students How to Revise, Rebecca Alber discusses the importance of “honouring the revision stage.” Teachers will often combine revising and editing which can confuse students and create a misconception that revising and editing are the same thing or that they only need to edit their work. As teachers, we need to help our students to understand that revising and editing are two different processes that are both critical in the effective writing process.

A helpful way for students to understand the difference between revising and editing is to use the short and catchy acronyms ARMS (for revising) and CUPS (for editing) as outlined in the anchor chart on the right from Teachers Pay Teachers. Students who look at the poster can see how revising involves making changes to the text in order to improve its meaning such as by expanding on an idea or substituting bland words for more rich and descriptive words. As the chart demonstrates, editing involves reviewing the text to correct any surface errors such as capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. This chart, therefore, would be helpful for my students as it provides them with a reference of what the different aspects of revising and editing are and what they need to look for when they are in these stages of the writing process.


Strategies for Revising

Revision Stations 
In their blog post 5 Peer Conferencing Strategies That Actually Work, We Are Teachers discuss the idea of revising stations where each station focuses on a different aspect of the revising process. For example, I could set up five revision stations in my class: Word Choice, Ideas and Content, Organization, Sentence Fluency, and Voice. Each station would have a card that offered the students prompts to guide them as they revised their work. For example, a prompt at the Sentence Fluency station might be: Did you use transition words to start your sentences? This focus on one aspect of revising at each station helps students to feel less overwhelmed and encourages them to practice methodically and thoroughly revising their text.

We Are Teachers.

Image retrieved from http://bit.ly/2ei3JpN.

Neon Revision 
Another strategy that We Are Teachers suggests to make revising more meaningful and engaging for students is neon revision. In neon revision, students use different coloured highlighters to focus on different aspects of the text. For example, my students could use blue to highlight all the verbs in their text to see whether they have used active, precise verbs. They could then use pink to highlight all the adjectives in their text to see whether they have used rich, descriptive adjectives.


Strategies for Editing

Checklists
In order to help my students become effective editors, I can provide them with a checklist to guide them as they edit their text. Checklists can make the process of editing seem less overwhelming for students as they break down the overall process of editing into more specific categories and manageable steps. The child is able to work through the editing process in a systematic way as they cross off each aspect of the editing process.

The Editing Checklist for Self- and Peer-Editing from ReadWriteThink is particularly helpful for students in two ways. First, it ensures that the student also has a peer edit their work. This peer might catch mistakes that the author did not notice during their self-edit and can provide the author with helpful comments and constructive feedback. Second, by personalizing the editing statements for the self-edit section, it encourages students to develop a sense of ownership and responsibility for their work.


Connections to the Ontario Curriculum

Helping students to become effective revisers and editors corresponds well to the Ontario Language Curriculum as revising and editing are two stages in the recursive writing process outlined in the curriculum. The second overall expectation of the Writing strand is to “draft and revise their writing, using a variety of informational, literary, and graphic forms and stylistic elements appropriate for the purpose and audience.” The third overall expectation is to “use editing, proofreading, and publishing skills and strategies, and knowledge of language conventions, to correct errors, refine expression, and present their work effectively.” By teaching my students how to revise and edit their work, I can empower them to become effective writers who purposefully and meaningfully communicate their thoughts.