Riveting Revision

Embracing the Change

Deborah Vichos

• Revision is looking back on your writing and thinking about how you can improve it.

• Revision is sharing your writing and gathering ideas from other writers to improve your writing.

• Revision is looking back at the piece you have just written and thinking about the reader; Can the reader visualize a picture of your place by reading your piece?

What Is Revision?

There are ten commandments of good

writing. The first nine are, “Thou shalt not be dull.”

-Meredith Sue Willis

The problem of dullnessOften experienced writers don’t have a sense of how much the reader needs to

know: the writer has a complete image in mind of

description or action or argument and they are

surprised that their writing didn’t convey to the whole

thing to the reader. - Willis

Revision keeps students’ writing from entering the world of

dullness because good peer editors don’t let this happen!

The active nature of peer editing makes for a livelier English class. Students can

learn to ask the right questions: could you tell me more here? Wouldn’t it make

sense if . . . ?-Willis

Different Roles As An Editor

• Be the worst possible teacher to your partner. Do all the worst things teachers could do to a paper.

• Do the opposite:be a good teacher.• Be a magazine editor considering this work for

publication. Don’t pay attention to grammar or spelling, just make the piece more interesting to a reader of your magazine.

• Be a copy editor. Concentrate on spelling, grammar, etc. Your job isn’t style, but correctness.

Nancy Atwell’s Peer ConferenceWriter-before you ask for a conference, your job is to consider what you want help with: ideas, language, images, organization, coherence, a part of the piece, a sense of the whole? Tell the responder what you want response to:

Reader-when you agree to confer with a writer your job is to help the writer think and make

decisions about the writing:-ask what he or she needs help with.-listen as the writer reads, try to understand the writing, then tell what you heard.-If there are parts that confuse you, you don’t understand, or you’d like to know more about, ask the writer about them. It will help you and the writer if you jot down your questions during and after the reading.-ask the writer what he or she plans to do next.-give the record of the conference to the writer.

For children working with others is a means of keeping the momentum going, of exploring further, of trying out various ideas—thus of revising more deeply. One child alone, faced with an interesting beginning, may lose the thread by the second day and end up sitting and staring.-Willis

Revision Needs to Be Taught Modeled and

Practiced• I’ve learned that when students don’t revise their

writing, it’s usually because they don’t know how to. They don’t have the methods for manipulating the page—adding information, deleting it, changing it, or moving it around.

• Students who have never seen a revised draft are reluctant to cross out, write between lines or in margins, make inserts with carets and arrows, or cut and tape their manuscripts. They need visual proof that this is what writers do. Teachers can provide it with demonstrations of our own writing.

-Atwell

Revision StrategiesCarets(^) enable writers to insert new words, phrases, and lines.

Spider legs are another method for adding. A writer drafts new material on strips of paper, then staples them to the original draft.

Arrows allow writers to extend writing into empty space on the paper: in the margins or the back.

Cut and Tape allows writers to insert new chunks of text and reorder existing sections. Revising doesn’t mean recopying.

Asterisks and other codes are useful for inserting chunks, passages bigger than a caret or an arrow can accommodate

Writers circle to indicate what they’ll keep in a given text. For beginning writers deleting is often harder than adding.

ApplicationRead “The Bummy Old Lady” and change it to make it better. Add to it, move things around, take things away, change words. Do anything you want to make it better.

She was very old and had bummy clothes and she had long hanging lips. She drinks a lot of wine and begs and also she doesn’t have any shoes. She has no house, no kids, not even a husband. Her clothes do not match, and also her her clothes have a lot of holes. She has on a man’s pants with holes in them and also she is very dirty, and she has an over coat with holes in it and she begs and begs and begs. And plus she has brown eyes, a big nose, a man’s voice, a scarred-up face, no hair and green teeth.

-Willis

Make a class collection of ideas for ways to revise. Use the

booklets when you are editing each other’s pieces on your own.

Learning is also more likely to happen when students can be involved and active and when they can learn from and with

other students.-Atwell