Are your students continually turning in work with missing capitalization and few punctuation marks? How do we teach them to slow down & break these bad writing habits?

Editing a student’s paper just makes that one piece of writing better. However, it does little to actually teach them how to become a better writer. Students must be trained on how to find and correct errors in their writing. These skills don’t come overnight, but I have some tips to help you!

1. Create a Safe Space

Talk about mistakes with your students. Don’t be embarrassed if you make mistakes.  Read books to them with characters who make mistakes. Make your classroom a safe place to be imperfect. Having a classroom that recognizes that errors are normal, and teaches a growth mindset is important. We should teach that mistakes are opportunities to learn!

2. Set Students up for Success

Have them set up their paper so that there will be plenty of room for revisions when it comes time. I like to have my students skip every other line. Students will be much more likely make the edits when there is space to do so. It signals that we will be editing later. I also tell them that everyone will need the space because everyone makes errors.

3. Have Students Draft Freely

During brainstorming & drafting remind them that it’s ok to make errors! It’s during the revising phase of the writing process where students are working to make their writing sound better by using a lead that hooks, more interesting words, dialogue, details, etc. There should be little talk of spelling and mechanics.

Only after the drafting and revising are complete, do writers move on to the editing phase. It’s during the editing phase that they focus on things like capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

Editing should happen on its own separate day. Students are much more likely to see, and willing to correct, errors on a day that is separate from the day that they wrote the piece. When we give students a break and then have them come back to do the editing, they will be more successful with editing. Their brains have had a break, and they are more likely to spot errors.

4. Simple Tools Go Along Way

We can help our writers to be more successful with editing by giving them resources and modeling how to use these resources. If you model using it every single time you edit in front of your students, it will teach them to do the same. Try providing students with:

• charts of commonly used words
• a poster of proof reading editing marks
• books or articles that they used for research
• anchor charts with basic grammar rules and editing marks
• word walls (for spelling patterns &/or content for spelling reference)

“Our focus should be on growth, not perfection.“

5. Read it Out Loud

Students can read their writing out loud to a partner or to themselves. You could also have a few stuffed animals that can serve as an audience on editing day. If the student has a pen handy, they will be ready to correct the errors that they find.

6. Make it a Game

Giving students one specific thing to look for will help them focus. We are bound to miss some very obvious errors when we look for every mistake in one swoop.

If you really want your students to be more independent with editing, teach them to read through their writing multiple times. Each time they are focused on just one type of edit. Make it a scavenger hunt!! (Just prepare them by telling them ahead of time that they will be doing this together as a group, and explain the reasoning behind it.  This will curb the moans of having to do something that seems repetitive.)

You can say…

• Check to be certain that the first word of every sentence is capitalized.
• Read through your writing again, and this time, make sure that every sentence ends with proper punctuation.
• Read through your writing once more, and make sure that you have correctly spelled words that you know how to spell. Underline words that look wrong, but you aren’t sure about.

7. A Tricky Trick

Another helpful tip when editing, is to have them re-read their writing one sentence at a time starting at the end and reading upwards. This takes our brains off of “auto pilot”, and we are less likely to just breeze over errors.

8. Put the Ball in Their Court

Let them find the majority of corrections to be made. Look for mistakes they are repeating, and give them just a couple of items to focus on. It’s much more manageable for them to improve on a few points than to try to take in all of their errors at once.

Your students WILL still turn in papers with errors, and that’s ok. They are learning. They are not supposed to be perfect.

Writing is an ongoing process. Encourage them and give them time to practice each new strategy. Little by little, you will see their writing & editing skills improve!

Before you students can edit properly, they’ll need some solid pieces of writing. Be sure to check out our Writing Plan. It gives you a step-by-step instructional plan for paragraph writing instruction and includes my 5 favorite go-to writing units! Informative, narrative, descriptive, opinion and summary units are included! Most of these units consist of 5 initial lessons. Students will explore topic sentences, supporting details, and concluding sentences of paragraphs. At the end of these lessons, students will have the organizational knowledge needed to write a solid paragraph that they can later expand into an essay.

You might also be interested in the post How to Teach Main Idea.

~ Melissa

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