Melody's Real World Editing Lessons

Melody Brennan was my co-facilitator in the Spring 2008 edition of the 6-Traits online writing class. She did a terrific job! Here's bit of advice she offered during our module on conventions. ~ Dennis

Thinking in terms of modeling and practicing, technology spell checking, and just plain teaching how to edit.....

While in the classroom I used our weekly classroom newsletters rather than DOL.

Here's how:

Each week I would type our newsletter that would be sent home to update the parents about what happened that week and what was hopefully going to happen the next week (one can never be 100% sure...even though we plan!) I would add errors, especially ones that spell check would not change or highlight. Students would look it over (peer editing), work together after looking individually, and then we would all come together to create our "final" draft. I would make the revisions and hand-out the final draft for copying. I would then ask a co-worker to come in so that I could ask them in front of the class if they could find some time to edit my work. I know what I want my newsletter to say, but sometimes that is the biggest problem....my brain is thinking one thing and my paper or newsletter is really saying something different. The students saw me asking another peer to look it over one more time before submitting the newsletter as the final draft.

This worked great! Life lessons in the making! I had parents searching to see if they could still find an error with their students at home. Of course, they were not always perfect and I would sometimes be greeted on Monday morning with a big circle around something. However, they all appreciated the learning that went behind the weekly newsletter.