Paragraph Writing, Week 4 Revising, Copy Editing, and Publishing: Would You Rather Be a Hammer or a Nail?

Overview This week continues the writing process for the “Hammer or a Nail” essay begun last week. Students will read each other’s drafts and construct a rubric to describe high, average, and low quality drafts. They will then peer edit and begin to revise. In the second hour, students will identify common spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors in the essays and work to correct these in their final essay drafts, which will be due at the start of class the following week.

First Hour: Revision Ask for volunteers to read aloud, or if students are reluctant, collect the papers and read them anonymously. Discuss the ideas in the papers, discussing what is good in each paragraph, and focusing in expression and ideas, not correctness Construct a rubric. Ask: What were the best papers like? What were the average papers like? What were the papers that need improvement like? Record the students’ ideas, contributing yourself as well.

GREAT WORK! AVERAGE WORK NEEDS MORE WORK

First Hour, Cont’d.: Revision Announce that the assessment for this assignment will follow this rubric: Great work: 13-15/20 Average work: 10-12/20 Needs more work: 7-9 Put students in groups of 2-3. Have them read each other’s papers and give feedback on what needs to be done to improve the paragraphs. Allow students to revise their original papers. Have students share (or collect and read) their new papers; discuss improvements that are seen and improvements that still need to occur.

Second Hour: Proofreading/Copyediting See the handout, Secret Friend’s Essay. A secret friend of the class (Aicha K.) visited last week and wrote her own version of the essay as a paragraph. Have the students correct a copy of the secret friend’s paragraph working together in small groups. As a whole class, collaborate to collect the secret friend’s paragraph, discussing the decisions the students made and working through the paragraph until it is completely copyedited. (NOTE: This is where we teach about sentence structure, grammar, etc., not in formal out-of-context lessons but as issues meaningfully arise.) Ask the students to identify the major errors that were made. Record these and have the students write them down in their notebooks. Put students in pairs and have them identify and correct each other’s errors. Assign the students to rewrite their final draft to correct all errors. The final draft of the paper is due at the beginning of the next class.

Publishing Create a writing blog for the class using Blogger. Invite/post students’ final paragraphs on the blog for the students to read. Assess the students’ paragraphs using the rubric created by the class.