How to Teach Students to Revise Their Writing

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today we're going to talk about how to teach students how to revise their writing. First of all, you should require your students to give you a rough draft of the paper, and even sometimes an outline of the paper so that you can sort of look at their argument and nip problems in the bud before they get to be too big to where the students have written the paper in this format and there's just a big roadblock for them. So first of all, a student has to know a good trajectory for writing a paper, so a rough draft is very important. Second, whenever you receive the first paper and you're going through it, write extensive notes on the paper for the student pointing out not only grammatical errors, but also errors in continuity, you know "this paragraph does not connect with the next," etcetera. Also, I would actually attach a type-written page of notes to the student so they can actually read your notes if you have really bad handwriting like I do, so they will be able to have that as a summary reference page for what was not working very well in their paper or to its best ability, so a student will have a very clear idea of what exactly it is that you need from the paper because often when students are asked to rewrite a paper they think "well I don't know what they want. I can't figure out what the professor wants. They just want me to rewrite it? I don't understand." So give them your comments. Give them extensive comments on what you need and what it is that's not working, and also ways to help it to work better. And also, if you want to be as tough as possible on the first grade, that would also be a good way to get students to want to rewrite the paper because you're giving them a chance to pull up the grade rather than just a chance to rewrite for rewriting sake. The next thing you're going to want to do is whenever you receive the rewrite of the paper, also ask for the first copy of the paper. This is going to take a little more time on your part, but you'll have both papers to look at. You can see whether or not they took your advice. If they were really trying to rewrite, because rewriting is really about the effort the student's putting in, not necessarily the results, but results are great. But if the student has really tried to take your advice and you can see that, definitely raise their grade as pertinent. This is really one of the best skills that students can acquire in college or in high school when writing because it gives them some perspective on the work that they've done and how to make that work better, so very important."