These days when I revise my writing, I just type a bit, think a bit, change a bit, delete a bit, add a bit. I do this over and over again. It's a combination of all the strategies I've learned throughout my school life and beyond. In fact, I had a whole different paragraph to begin this blog post, but I completely changed it because I changed my mind. Choices, choices.
Enter the middle school student writer.
How Do You Teach a Student to Revise Their Work?
Students in middle school create a first draft and often consider it their best work. That doesn't cut it with me. If they're human (and I think that most of them are), they're going to make mistakes they don't catch their first time through. Or, more importantly, they'll determine a piece that needs better clarity. I believe writing can always be improved with a second or third or fourth or fifth try, correct? Effort is central to success.
I teach first draft as an idea dump. Students have been through our planning process and now have to dump all their ideas in a decent format in their first draft. I tell them they've got to go with their gut; it's got to be fast so that they can get their main ideas out before they forget them. I instruct them not to be reckless, unless they want to work extra hard later to fix the slew of errors that will occur if they're not somewhat careful with spelling and sentences. We also skip lines when we write our first drafts. (I have students put Xs on every other line in the margins so they remember to skip lines!)
Since I like food, and since students like food, I have been sharing a pizza analogy with the students about what I expect when they revise. I remember when my own two boys were younger and they would eat nothing but cheese pizza. My wife and I tried to tell them they could just take off the toppings, which they would, but they did not like it at all. It was too much of a hassle to try to get them to eat anything but cheese pizza without complaint.
Now that my boys are older, things are different. They've adjusted and changed, and I want my students to get to that point, too. I need them to learn to make changes to their writing...in the revising stage.
In the Pepperoni Stage.
I tell them that when I was younger I liked plain cheese pizza, too. All the other toppings were:
Now that I'm older and more mature, I've learned to appreciate alternative flavors and textures...except for the olives, but I'll eat the ones that don't "fall off" my slice without complaint.
For the sake of my lesson, I tell them that as their primary reader of what they write, I now prefer pepperoni pizza over plain cheese. I share that I don't want too much pepperoni on my pizza or too little. It needs to be JustWrite.
When you teach the writing process in your classroom, I'm sure you hear the question, "How much revising do I need?" You know, then, that most students actually mean, "How much revising DON'T I need?" Really..."How much for an A?"
It's at that point that I liken their first drafts to a plain cheese pizza. I proceed to tell them that I'm not a fan of cheese pizza anymore. I've since developed a more complex palette, and I want more FLAVOR! And they should want to provide their audience (me) with the flavor I desire. As I've said before (check out this post), students must work to satisfy this hungry patron...the customer is always right, you know.
The cheese pizza has a solid base with dough, sauce, cheese, and seasonings, but I want something better; they must add in the pepperoni I love so much. And I want pepperoni in each bite.
Revising v. Editing
Before students can add more pepperoni, they need to learn the focus of REVISING versus editing. So many of them believe that capitalizing a letter counts as revising, so I teach them The CUPS acronym for editing - Capitalization, Usage, Punctuation, Spelling - and relate to them that in editing we make our writing LOOK better. For example, I could have a student stand up and read their writing in class, and even if it has multiple spelling and capitalization errors, they can read it fluently so it sounds mistake free. Well, when they turn the paper in, I will catch those errors because it LOOKS sloppy.
On the other hand, revising is making your writing SOUND better. Deciding on better vocabulary words, more effective phrases, and more advanced sentence structure or paragraph order is revising. If a student reads the writing to me, I can hear the errors they've made, and we can at that point adjust.
For that reason, we write our first drafts in blue pen so that there is no erasing - no scratch outs either! We just write as quickly and naturally as we can. This way students focus on their brain dump based on their Plan without too much concern over exact correctness in grammar or careful sentence structure.
And then we revise - not edit - revise. We work to make it SOUND better, and this is done in pencil because it's the stage where we make changes. We cross out words, phrases, or sentences with a single pencil line (so that we can see what we're changing), and we write the changes in the blank lines left over from the first draft. We use pencil so that we can write, and erase, and rewrite, and erase, and so on and so forth. We continue to make it SOUND better and better and better. I encourage students to go through their papers multiple times for different purposes, sometimes for a particular trait of writing from the 6+1 Traits of Good Writing, sometimes for a particular piece highlighted from my rubric for the assignment, sometimes for a grammar concept I'd like to see, etc.
Now back to this pizza analogy. "How much do we need to revise, Mr. T.?" Students wonder how many pencil marks they need in order to reach the "A."
My response:
Who likes pizza?
"Oh, everybody? Okay, who likes combination with everything on it, you know, olives, mushrooms, meat, onions, peppers, anchovies? Nobody? Well then. Who likes CHEESE pizza? Most of you...okay...I got it.
"Let's just say your first drafts are that cheese pizza. You like it, right? You think it's really good? You are completely satisfied with it, and you could just eat it and love it? Well, I liked cheese pizza, too, when I was young. It was the best thing ever!
"Now, though, I need TOPPINGS! I need some separation of flavors. I've matured, and my tastes have changed. I need pepperoni, at the least."
I limit it to pepperoni as to not get too complicated, but you could take the analogy further if you wanted, adding in different toppings to stand for different types of revisions. For 6th grade, though, we keep it simple.
I tell students, "Every pencil mark you make in your first draft is like a piece of pepperoni that makes the writing (the pizza) that much better. I need more flavor, more spice, more variety. When you change a word in your writing because you've used it too much already, that's a piece of pepperoni. When you pull out a prepositional phrase because it didn't sound right or describe correctly, that's a piece of pepperoni. When you cross out a sentence to write something more elaborative, or when you insert a word to add more detail, that's a piece of pepperoni."
Then I ask students a few other questions to drive home the point. "Have you ever had a pepperoni pizza that had too few pieces of pepperoni on it?" They agree that, yes, they have. So I say, "Don't make too few revising marks!"
I follow that up with, "Have you ever had a pepperoni pizza that had way too much pepperoni? You know, the kind that is way too spicy, or the kind that falls apart because the cheese doesn't hold it all together right?" Most of them understand this, too. I say, "You don't need to overdo it."
And then I ask them how much pepperoni they like on their pizza. It's hard for them to quantify, just like it's hard to quantify how much revising is necessary on a first draft. So I draw these examples of pizza on the board (or I have students do this).
With this analogy students even know that they can't simply revise a bunch in just one paragraph. I'm not getting that all around balance I like so much. If a student got lazy and just revised the introduction and nothing else, it might look like this:
I tell them, "I like pepperoni in each bite, maybe even a few pieces of pepperoni in each bite. What would that look like?"
We can then agree how much pepperoni this teacher likes. And as is normal in all classrooms, the students understand that they are working to meet the teacher's expectations. They figure out my intentions for them in their revising, which just happens to be the same way I like my pepperoni pizza.
I come back to this analogy every single time we revise one of our formal writing assignments in the 6th grade.
Recently I Took It a Step Further.
It was a day when students' revising responsibilities were due. How do you grade such an assignment? Formally, it's difficult to grade, so I often quickly look them over and give completion points, with a point or more taken off for not having "enough" pepperoni/pencil.
I asked for a volunteer, and a million hands shot up. I asked for somebody extremely brave, and a few hands went down. I asked for somebody whose parents wouldn't call or email me to complain, and more hands went down. And finally I asked for somebody who felt they had enough revising, and a few hands remained up. So I chose somebody whose parents I knew who trusted me completely.
"Bring me your first draft, please," I told the student. He walked up and handed it to me, and I had him sit down again.
Without looking at the paper, I folded it in half, bared my teeth and took a bite out of it. The result?
Before you protest, I just have to say there was very little saliva involved, and I promised to tape it up nicely when I was finished, which I did. I gave my students some more time to revise (and now edit) using a checklist I had, and the object lesson was complete.
I aim to make student learning memorable.
I feel the analogy of a cheese (first draft) versus a pepperoni (revised) pizza makes sense to students on their level. The whole taking-a-bite-out-of-a-student-paper thing may be too much for you, so use whatever advice you can glean out of this post to help your students understand how much they should revise their first drafts.
As I stated at the beginning, my own revising has become a continuous process (I'm a perfectionist), and I hope my students learn to work toward continuous revising, too. In the 6th grade, we sometimes work on baby steps, which is why I have students separate their marks by color (blue for first draft, pencil for revising, red for editing) to learn the writing process. From there we type up a final copy.
If I consider how much pepperoni would be all over this blog post, I couldn't stomach the amount. And it's now time to scroll to the top and read this all over again to see how I can make my own writing SOUND better (and maybe LOOK better too).
If you know somebody in the middle grades who needs professional attention and feedback for their writing, visit my JustWrite site or email me at JustWriteWithT@gmail.com to learn more about what I do.
Enter the middle school student writer.
How Do You Teach a Student to Revise Their Work?
Students in middle school create a first draft and often consider it their best work. That doesn't cut it with me. If they're human (and I think that most of them are), they're going to make mistakes they don't catch their first time through. Or, more importantly, they'll determine a piece that needs better clarity. I believe writing can always be improved with a second or third or fourth or fifth try, correct? Effort is central to success.
I teach first draft as an idea dump. Students have been through our planning process and now have to dump all their ideas in a decent format in their first draft. I tell them they've got to go with their gut; it's got to be fast so that they can get their main ideas out before they forget them. I instruct them not to be reckless, unless they want to work extra hard later to fix the slew of errors that will occur if they're not somewhat careful with spelling and sentences. We also skip lines when we write our first drafts. (I have students put Xs on every other line in the margins so they remember to skip lines!)
Since I like food, and since students like food, I have been sharing a pizza analogy with the students about what I expect when they revise. I remember when my own two boys were younger and they would eat nothing but cheese pizza. My wife and I tried to tell them they could just take off the toppings, which they would, but they did not like it at all. It was too much of a hassle to try to get them to eat anything but cheese pizza without complaint.
Now that my boys are older, things are different. They've adjusted and changed, and I want my students to get to that point, too. I need them to learn to make changes to their writing...in the revising stage.
In the Pepperoni Stage.
I tell them that when I was younger I liked plain cheese pizza, too. All the other toppings were:
"too spicy! too gross! or too strangely textured!"
Now that I'm older and more mature, I've learned to appreciate alternative flavors and textures...except for the olives, but I'll eat the ones that don't "fall off" my slice without complaint.
For the sake of my lesson, I tell them that as their primary reader of what they write, I now prefer pepperoni pizza over plain cheese. I share that I don't want too much pepperoni on my pizza or too little. It needs to be JustWrite.
When you teach the writing process in your classroom, I'm sure you hear the question, "How much revising do I need?" You know, then, that most students actually mean, "How much revising DON'T I need?" Really..."How much for an A?"
It's at that point that I liken their first drafts to a plain cheese pizza. I proceed to tell them that I'm not a fan of cheese pizza anymore. I've since developed a more complex palette, and I want more FLAVOR! And they should want to provide their audience (me) with the flavor I desire. As I've said before (check out this post), students must work to satisfy this hungry patron...the customer is always right, you know.
The cheese pizza has a solid base with dough, sauce, cheese, and seasonings, but I want something better; they must add in the pepperoni I love so much. And I want pepperoni in each bite.
Revising v. Editing
Before students can add more pepperoni, they need to learn the focus of REVISING versus editing. So many of them believe that capitalizing a letter counts as revising, so I teach them The CUPS acronym for editing - Capitalization, Usage, Punctuation, Spelling - and relate to them that in editing we make our writing LOOK better. For example, I could have a student stand up and read their writing in class, and even if it has multiple spelling and capitalization errors, they can read it fluently so it sounds mistake free. Well, when they turn the paper in, I will catch those errors because it LOOKS sloppy.
On the other hand, revising is making your writing SOUND better. Deciding on better vocabulary words, more effective phrases, and more advanced sentence structure or paragraph order is revising. If a student reads the writing to me, I can hear the errors they've made, and we can at that point adjust.
For that reason, we write our first drafts in blue pen so that there is no erasing - no scratch outs either! We just write as quickly and naturally as we can. This way students focus on their brain dump based on their Plan without too much concern over exact correctness in grammar or careful sentence structure.
And then we revise - not edit - revise. We work to make it SOUND better, and this is done in pencil because it's the stage where we make changes. We cross out words, phrases, or sentences with a single pencil line (so that we can see what we're changing), and we write the changes in the blank lines left over from the first draft. We use pencil so that we can write, and erase, and rewrite, and erase, and so on and so forth. We continue to make it SOUND better and better and better. I encourage students to go through their papers multiple times for different purposes, sometimes for a particular trait of writing from the 6+1 Traits of Good Writing, sometimes for a particular piece highlighted from my rubric for the assignment, sometimes for a grammar concept I'd like to see, etc.
Now back to this pizza analogy. "How much do we need to revise, Mr. T.?" Students wonder how many pencil marks they need in order to reach the "A."
My response:
Who likes pizza?
"Oh, everybody? Okay, who likes combination with everything on it, you know, olives, mushrooms, meat, onions, peppers, anchovies? Nobody? Well then. Who likes CHEESE pizza? Most of you...okay...I got it.
"Let's just say your first drafts are that cheese pizza. You like it, right? You think it's really good? You are completely satisfied with it, and you could just eat it and love it? Well, I liked cheese pizza, too, when I was young. It was the best thing ever!
"Now, though, I need TOPPINGS! I need some separation of flavors. I've matured, and my tastes have changed. I need pepperoni, at the least."
I limit it to pepperoni as to not get too complicated, but you could take the analogy further if you wanted, adding in different toppings to stand for different types of revisions. For 6th grade, though, we keep it simple.
I tell students, "Every pencil mark you make in your first draft is like a piece of pepperoni that makes the writing (the pizza) that much better. I need more flavor, more spice, more variety. When you change a word in your writing because you've used it too much already, that's a piece of pepperoni. When you pull out a prepositional phrase because it didn't sound right or describe correctly, that's a piece of pepperoni. When you cross out a sentence to write something more elaborative, or when you insert a word to add more detail, that's a piece of pepperoni."
Then I ask students a few other questions to drive home the point. "Have you ever had a pepperoni pizza that had too few pieces of pepperoni on it?" They agree that, yes, they have. So I say, "Don't make too few revising marks!"
With this analogy students even know that they can't simply revise a bunch in just one paragraph. I'm not getting that all around balance I like so much. If a student got lazy and just revised the introduction and nothing else, it might look like this:
I come back to this analogy every single time we revise one of our formal writing assignments in the 6th grade.
Recently I Took It a Step Further.
It was a day when students' revising responsibilities were due. How do you grade such an assignment? Formally, it's difficult to grade, so I often quickly look them over and give completion points, with a point or more taken off for not having "enough" pepperoni/pencil.
I asked for a volunteer, and a million hands shot up. I asked for somebody extremely brave, and a few hands went down. I asked for somebody whose parents wouldn't call or email me to complain, and more hands went down. And finally I asked for somebody who felt they had enough revising, and a few hands remained up. So I chose somebody whose parents I knew who trusted me completely.
"Bring me your first draft, please," I told the student. He walked up and handed it to me, and I had him sit down again.
Without looking at the paper, I folded it in half, bared my teeth and took a bite out of it. The result?
Before you protest, I just have to say there was very little saliva involved, and I promised to tape it up nicely when I was finished, which I did. I gave my students some more time to revise (and now edit) using a checklist I had, and the object lesson was complete.
I aim to make student learning memorable.
I feel the analogy of a cheese (first draft) versus a pepperoni (revised) pizza makes sense to students on their level. The whole taking-a-bite-out-of-a-student-paper thing may be too much for you, so use whatever advice you can glean out of this post to help your students understand how much they should revise their first drafts.
As I stated at the beginning, my own revising has become a continuous process (I'm a perfectionist), and I hope my students learn to work toward continuous revising, too. In the 6th grade, we sometimes work on baby steps, which is why I have students separate their marks by color (blue for first draft, pencil for revising, red for editing) to learn the writing process. From there we type up a final copy.
If I consider how much pepperoni would be all over this blog post, I couldn't stomach the amount. And it's now time to scroll to the top and read this all over again to see how I can make my own writing SOUND better (and maybe LOOK better too).
If you know somebody in the middle grades who needs professional attention and feedback for their writing, visit my JustWrite site or email me at JustWriteWithT@gmail.com to learn more about what I do.
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