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| Anonymous. "Monk Working on Illuminated Manuscript." Retrieved from http://goo.gl/MeIpbv |
Eight-year-old
Dominic has been entrusted with a most sacred and important task. Through a
combination of inspiration from the heavenly Muses and his own memory, he must
craft an account that will be preserved throughout the ages. All the writing is
divinely inspired; there can be no room for error. Heaven forbid one thing be
erased, changed, or altered from its original form. The time to finish his task
is nigh. There must be no hesitation.
What is his task you ask?
Constructing a descriptive paragraph
about his family’s trip to the water park in his writing journal.
No, in truth there is nothing
exceptionally important about constructing that descriptive paragraph. It’s
fun, it helps develop Dominic’s writing abilities and practice his use of
adjectives, and it’s a topic he’s fairly interested in. But it seems to be the
case with so many students that the revision part of the writing process is
something to be feared and avoided. It is almost as if they have chiselled
their assignments into stone rather than scratched it out on a piece of
looseleaf or typed it on their electronic device. To change something is both
impossible and an indication of failure and weakness.
What Can We As Teachers Do To Help?
Rest easy, gentle educators! There
are many ways to help inspire revision. I gained much insight from Noreen Moore’s
eccentrically named blog post
“Revision Makes My Students Thirsty.” She too notices the strange effect
revision has on her class and makes some suggestions about how to cause an
attitude shift.
One of the things she suggests,
which I absolutely love, is exposing students to what some experienced and
famous writers think about the writing process and how much time they spend
revising. This can take the form of quotes from famous authors about revision
around the classroom, or you can even show some early drafts of different authors’
works, and show how much the poem or story gets marked up and tweaked before it
reaches its final form.
If students can see that writers
they hold in high regard, people they think are really smart and creative, are
comfortable changing their work, perhaps this will help them in revising their
own work as well.
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| Jane Austen's draft of Persuasion. Notice how much has been crossed out! "Jane Austen Persuasion Manuscript." Retrieved from http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/manuscripts/blpers/Front_(left)_board.html |
Try Some Revision Activities
There are also some activities you
can do in the classroom to help light the fires of inspiration. There are the
tried and true things you can do, such as peer editing or having the student
read their work aloud (not necessarily in front of the class), so the student
can distance him or herself from the piece and see what changes to make. Students
can bring in music, images, photos, etc. that connect to his or her piece and
see if that they can incorporate any associations from those images into their
writing.
Teachers can also try re-branding
revision as play or tinkering. Revision can be scary, because it implies that
there was something wrong with the
piece of writing. Well, the writing may not be wrong in that it is
grammatically incorrect, but it could use some tinkering in that there could be
more figurative language to make the writing more colourful, or maybe there
needs to be an additional character to flesh out the narrative.
Closing Thoughts
Revision, proofreading, and editing
are all important parts of the Writing strand of the Ontario curriculum, and
need to be treated with the same attention, if not more, as the actual drafting
of the piece. Helping students to see that revision is not scary, but to be encouraged,
will help them now and in their writing for years to come.
Very few things are set in stone,
and students need to know that their writing certainly isn’t. And that’s okay!
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