Teaching writing can be tough for some students, especially for reluctant writers. Make sure to check the earlier blog post, Teaching Writing – Step 4 – Rough Draft. Teaching editing of the writing process can be challenging when students don’t have a direction.
Teaching editing is a tough task for some students. Some students can reread their rough draft and find errors. However, it can be a very broad and abstract task for some students. Even for other students, they believe that once they finish with their rough draft, they are finished. Lots of challenges in editing.
Once again, begin by modeling this step. Depending on your students, you may want to approach this a few different ways. Typically I provide students a self-edit checklist to help guide this step. This can be as simple as checking for capital letters to more complex editing. I do have a graphic organizer resource that contains several self-edit checklists as well as other spelling resources.
Some students will be able to use the Self-Edit Checklist as a guide when editing their rough draft to edit. These students will be able to read each sentence and find all the errors: making sure the sentence makes sense, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, etc. They even may need to go through a few times, but essentially, the students can edit with the entire checklist.
For other students, they will want to look for one edit at a time on their checklist. First, reread to just look for correct capitalizations or just capitalizations at the beginning of the sentence. After editing the entire piece for that edit, go on to another one, maybe sentences make sense or punctuation. This can be more time consuming, but it’s easier for students to tackle.
Using the rough draft writing piece you previously wrote, model editing your work depending on your students. Or pull some students for further editing instructions at a small group table.
After modeling editing process while teaching writing, send students off to edit their work. I have students edit individually with a specific list before editing with a partner. It’s easy to create your own Self-Edit Checklist on Google Doc or Google Sheets.
I have some in my Graph Organizer resource as well as within each Writing Unit. It may be helpful for some students to have a Student Dictionary or Sight Word Sheet to help them during this process. This can also be found in my store under the Graphic Organizer resource as well as in the Student Dictionary.
Before sending the students off to peer edit, I would model the process with your own work or one that you can give tips that would be helpful for the students to hear. I would give the peer editors expectations, one positive comment and two recommendations.
Recommendations could be general, like capitalization or punctuation, or more specific like expanding a portion of their writing. Whatever the recommendations for peer editing, I require them to provide a positive comment before feedback or suggestions on how to improve their writing. This can be a verbal conversation or use a worksheet.
