Activities that Support Revision

• Planning Calendars for Writing Projects
  Asking students to develop their own planning calendar for the project can help them consider how to manage a large writing project, while prompting them to think about their own writing processes. Including draft due dates and final due dates helps students consider how they might use the time in-between these dates to focus on revising. (Will Duffy has a great example)

• Revision Plans
  Revision plans make explicit the expectation that students will use feedback they receive to inform revisions. Revision plans can take different forms – from responses to a list of questions to a well-structured paragraph prioritizing students’ needed revisions. For instance, The Brief Thomson Handbook encourages students to review their self-assessment and their peer feedback and to “write down at least five things you will work on in your revision” (p. 31).

• Cut and Paste Reorganization – High-tech or Low-tech
  Students can physically cut their paper into smaller pieces (often individual paragraphs) and then rearrange the paragraphs and paste or tape them onto another sheet of paper. In a computer classroom, students can use Word to cut and paste paragraphs, although they sometimes are more resistant to making major changes to the structure. As an alternate version of this activity, students can hand the individual paragraphs over to another student and ask their peer to put the pieces in the order that seems most logical.

• Blind Rewrite
  Ask students to turn their paper over (or to close it on their computer screen) and to rewrite the introduction (or another section) from memory. What are the key ideas that they recalled? Did they leave out extraneous details that could be omitted from the original version? Did they add points that should be further developed?

Tags: revising, writing process