Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In this second part (of two) episodes, I teach the important skill of editing student writing. Editing student writing is a skill that teachers can achieve through years and years of practice. It takes some nuancing to truly apply what we teach students in grammar and language arts to their writing (for them as writers and us as editors/graders!).
Last week I walked you through official proofreader’s marks in the free teacher document that is found in last week and this week’s Teacher’s Notebook. I also walked you through my own “proofreader’s marks”/coding that I use on student papers to actually TEACH through my edits. (There is a copy of those in the TN as well.)
This week I applied all of that by showing you how I use it in an actual edit of a student’s paper (a short story). Here are some of the things you will learn as I walk through the edits in this episode:
- The importance of and how to indicate when a sentence is a real sentence and when it is not
- Quick ways to show illegal joining of sentences/comma splices/run ons
- How to indicate fixes for “illegal” sentences, compound sentences, sentence openers with sentences, etc. quickly (without having to “rewrite” in the margins, etc.)
- How to use the same phrasing and cues on student papers as you do when you teach grammar/usage (i.e. FANBOYS, CS is complete sentence, Sub Clause Open, etc.) to keep that continuity of teaching across the board
- How to show well done work and needs improvement work—and the importance of both
- Using my “codes” for as many short-cuts as you can to reduce editing time
- How to choose which things to edit and which things to skip—since we don’t want to mark everything that is wrong (i.e. watch for the continuous errors in that paper and indicate those)
- Much more! 😊
I feel so strongly about teaching from students’ writing through excellent editing that I spend a great deal of time, effort, resources, and even money to be sure it happens each week for my sixty in-person writing and grammar students. It is that important to me. (And you’ll find out the WHY in Episode #31 and the HOW in this week’s episode!)
Of course, just like every lesson in my one-month downloadable books and my one-semester Meaningful Composition books, this one has the invaluable Proofreader’s Marks document for teachers to print and use immediately. (It also contains my secret proofreader’s marks and a sample edited student paper.
Oh….and if you want a decorative Proofreader’s Marks poster for students, teacher docs of proofreader’s marks, and more for FREE, grab it here!
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast
