A couple of blog posts ago, we talked about editing student work. I want to revisit that topic this morning.
Obviously there is a difference between editing the essay of a 12th grader and editing the essay of a 4th grader, in terms of content, in terms of how picky you choose to be, and in terms of how carefully you scrutinize the arguments the student puts forth.
In spite of that, there are some elements of editing that are common to all editing processes.
At Classical Writing, we divide our editing steps into macro editing and micro editing.
By macro editing, we mean looking at over all content and arguments of the essay. By micro editing, we mean looking at the details of the essay: spelling, punctuation, dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s.
There is NO POINT in microediting an essay (or a writing project/narration) unless you and the student are in agreement about the global issues of the essay.
In other words, if a fourth grade student is writing a narration of a complicated long story like Andersen’s The Fir Tree, and if the student has some issues in terms of writing the story sequence wrong, or perhaps his story is too long — there is no point in trying to correct his spelling or his punctuation at this point. — First the student needs to agree with his teacher on the big issues of the essay, getting the title, purpose, and content right (macro editing), and once those issues are settled, it is worth working on the details (micro editing).
We recommend that your students turn in essays/writing projects at least twice. Once for macro editing (helping the student with big issue content and organization) and the second time for micro editing (sentence structure issues, word choices, spelling, and punctuation).
Now, if you are a ‘grammar nazi’, stifle yourself on the details in the first edition of the writing project. Even if you do see an apostrophe missing or realize that the student has used affect where he should have said ‘ effect, stifle yourself and let it go. You need to help your student look at the big issues of his essay,and pointing out spellos is distracting to the student and may derail him from paying attention to the issues he needs to deal with. It is important to teach the student to focus on the major issues, and to focus to the point where he engages with those issues before he turns his attention to details.
After all, details in the essay will not matter if whole sentences and words will be scrapped after the first rewrite.
We offer two sets of tables in our books, tables which aid you in editing. They can be found in all our books from Aesop and up.
One table is a macro editing check list, another table is a micro editing check list.
Those tables are our answer to the rubrics. But unlike rubrics which are meant for just one iteration of the assignment, these are meant for at least two iterations of the assignment: the first time the student turns the essay in, we help him improve content, arguments, and big issues. The second time he turns the essay in, we edit it for details. That way, the last time the student turns in his essay, most of the content, organization, and style issues of the essay are resolved.