Last week I promised more on revision and editing. These terms are often used interchangeably in our classrooms and yet there are important distinctions between the two processes.

When we teach our students to revise, we want them to make significant changes to their writing such as adjusting the order of their ideas, adding/deleting words or sentences. If we ask students to revise, many of them don’t know what we are asking them to do. I teach students to revise within my mini-lessons where I target a particular skill. In this way, I am able to model and scaffold the revision process by connecting it directly to the skill I am teaching: organization, sentence fluency, or word choice, for example. Over time, they learn the various ways in which they can revise their writing, and by focusing on one skill at a time, we make it manageable.

And what about editing? I’m sure you agree that we want our students to learn to write with proper conventions. Think of editing as the final touches: punctuation, capital letters, and conventional spelling. We can’t (and shouldn’t) expect our students to write with proper conventions as they put words to paper. As I wrote last week, this will only serve to stifle our writers, and will often deter them from writing at all.

I train students to read over and edit anything they are handing in–a narrative story, a persuasive piece, their social studies test. But I don’t ask them to edit every piece of writing they do. If they have written a reader response or a freewrite that no one else is going to read, I don’t ask them to spend time editing their piece. This encourages students to write more freely and creatively, take risks when writing, and even to write more.

Whatever grade level we teach, by separating the actual writing from the processes of revision and editing, each process–including the writing itself–becomes much more effective.