Marymcb’s Weblog

REVISION is key!!! In my other life, I worked for the Charlotte Observer and a small town newspaper. I could write a story relatively quickly, but to make it right, I had to revise. At first I was a little taken aback. After all, I had been an English teacher. I quickly discovered that writing for the newspaper was the best writing training I could ever have had. It has helped me to get to the heart of the matter without trying to be impressively verbose. Word processing has definitely helped. I used to write out everything by hand and then put it on the wordprocessor. Later I would write one draft, print it and then revise. I still do this occassionally depending. More often, I write in word and just go back and easily edit. I’m not sure this would be the best approach with developing writers because I think it would be more difficult for them to see the revision process. Even the best writing is a continual developmental process. One of the things I used to do was to have kids self and peer edit with specific editing sheets so that they would be forced to look at what they were doing, not only sentence and paragraph analysis, but word choice as well. I do think this helps, especially when they have specifics to guide their editing and revisions. Modeling is also key and the teacher needs to be the model revisor. I like the films we’ve seen (W/Dr. Schlagal?) with the teachers writing while the students write. What better message could the teacher send to aspiring writers?!