Improving Student Writing Skills - cse crafts

The Writing Process
dents will revise only for content in this step, rather than
proofreading for spelling and grammar, which they will
do while editing. To reinforce this important distinction,
you may ask students to use a different color pencil for
revision than for editing. For example, you may keep a
class set of green pencils for use only while revising and
a set of red pencils only for editing/proofreading.
Peer/Parent Revising
In Hillocks’ (1984) extensive evaluation of writing
instruction techniques, one of the few absolutes was his
recommendation of small group collaboration on problem-solving
activities related to writing. The goal of this
collaboration between students (or indeed, between students
and any reader) is the transfer of information from
author to reader. For example, it may be obvious to the
author that his/her dog attacking the postal carrier is a
humorous situation, but if the author fails to adequately
describe his/her eight-week-old Pomeranian puppy, the
audience may miss the humor. Additionally, an author
may have the intended cadence of a sentence in his/her
mind, but through peer/parent revision may find that,
without proper punctuation, the sentence is difficult to
read. In both cases, the audience is the best barometer of
success. Also, through working to revise someone else’s
writing, students will collaboratively learn techniques
they can use in their own writing.
The adult/parent revision option allows you to involve
parents more closely in their child’s education and helps
bridge the gap between school and home. You may
require both peer and adult revision, offer the option of
one or the other, or simply use peer revision, as this technique
is easier to control in the format of your classroom
and requires less organized correspondence.
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