Re: editing skills

["Writing Consulting: Faculty Resources" <writingc@falcon.cc.ukans.edu>]

I've had success with teaching literal "re-seeing" of the paper, using
some of the strategies that I used with Writer's Workbench.  I encourage
students to do "things" with their paper that will literally change the
appearance, so that the student can no longer see the paper through the
writer's eyes.  I use standard strategies, but when I combine them with
the writerly/readerly rhetorical discussion, students seem to understand
that these will work for them as independent writers.

1.  Do a "save as" and break a copy of a troublesome paragraph into
sentences. The student can then evaluate all sorts of sentence-level
issues, especially using the "power points" of a sentence well.  This
strategy really helps pronoun agreement issues to pop out, by the way. 

2.  Do a "save as" to make a copy.  Then, bolden the opening and ending
sentences of each paragraph.  Do some cut and pasting to create an
abstract and then critique for organization, coherence, and development.

3.  Execute an information management analysis on a troublesome chunk of
text.  What's "given" information?  What's "new"?  And what's the rest?

These are among the strategies that encourage the students to get into the
draft in process--like getting hands into clay. In the process of looking
at the text from a different perspective, they see other things as well:
missing words and ideas, punctuation problems (because now they are the
reader and they need the signals punctuation provides), absent
transitional markers, etc.  Most of all, they have skills that allow them
to work on their texts themselves.  They have a procedure for "looking
over" their text that will yield some substantive results.


Pat McQueeney
Writing Consulting:  Faculty Resources
KU's Writing Across the Curriculum Service
(913) 864-4232
http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~writingc/index.html