Improving Student Writing Skills - cse crafts

Improving Student Writing Skills
Therefore, strive to teach them universal editing marks
that can be understood by everyone.
• Students Need Specifics
“Children tend to overestimate their own and others’
comprehension of text, and thus, they do not identify
specific areas of text that could benefit from revision”
(Beal, 1993, p. 643). At first, you may need to ask students
to revise very specific elements (such as one of the Traits
of Good Writing, as described in Chapter 4). Consider
using mini lessons (in a writing workshop) to demonstrate
revision of passages on an overhead. Once you have
picked a revision topic, such as word choice, work as a
class to revise the passage such that each student gains
a picture of exactly what makes one word “better” than
another. After demonstrating, ask students to apply the
same technique in their own writing.
• One Thing at a Time!
Until students are proficient in noticing what needs revision,
they should revise for only one issue at a time, likely
one of the Traits of Good Writing. Perhaps on the first
pass they will look only at their organization, and on the
next they will evaluate their use of word choice, and so
on. This will help students put specific language to their
nagging idea that something isn’t quite right. As many
of the traits are interrelated (disturbing a piece’s organization
will affect sentence fluency), you may want to
encourage students to revise in the following order: ideas,
organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency.
• Make the Distinction Between Revising and
Proofreading
Revising is for content, while proofreading (editing) is
for conventions (Reed, 1995). As long as the conventions
used in a draft allow the material to be readable, your stu-
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