Category: Teaching Writing Process Strategies

• 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?

• In-Class Revising Activities
  One way to make time for revising – and to help students practice new revising strategies – is to facilitate in-class revising activities. Several ideas are noted below.

• Time for Revision in Assignment/Project Schedule
  If we want students to grapple with revising and to make sophisticated rhetorical choices, then we must make time for revising in project schedules. How much time do you allot for revising in your current assignment schedules? 2 days? 0 days? 1 week? What do you do in-class during that time?

• Multiple Drafts
  Another way to promote revising is to require multiple drafts and to offer clear guidance on how subsequent drafts should differ from earlier drafts in the project. Do you discuss with students the rationale for requiring more than one draft? How do you articulate the changes you expect to see?

• Revising Days vs. Editing Days
  In some second language writing pedagogies, instructors differentiate between revising days and editing days. On revising days, students only receive feedback on higher order concerns (topic development, use of evidence, organization, etc.). Students respond to this initial revising feedback and bring a second draft for an editing day, when they receive feedback on lower order concerns (sentence style, mechanics, grammar, etc.). This distinction transfers well to mainstream writing classrooms as a way to help students concentrate on significant revisions before focusing on editing that might become irrelevant if the writer is still revising. How else might planning separate revising and editing days help us support the ENG 110 objective of helping students develop sophisticated writing processes? The objective of helping students develop an understanding of the relationship of purpose, audience, and voice, and an awareness that writing expectations and conventions vary within the academy and in professional and public discourse?

Microsoft Words includes a wealth of tools that students haven’t tried. Students often benefit from an introduction to/review of formatting features (headers with page numbers and hanging indents) and citation tools.

Introduce students to this research tool, which enables them to highlight and annotate web pages. For information about a Diigo education account, visit the FAQ page at http://help.diigo.com/Diigo_Educator_Account_-_FAQ