>Bill McCleary responded to Ed Vavra's interesting, though troubling post,
>with the following suggestion:
>
>>. I looked in vain for someone to tell Susan to sit
>> down with her son and a draft of the paper, go through about half of it
>> with him to show how punctuation should be corrected, and challenge him to
>> correct the rest on his own. Then she can check over the rest, discuss the
>> corrections with her son, and go from there. (Or, if she regards this as
>> giving her son too much help--a form of cheating, perhaps--she could work
>> with final drafts that have already been graded by the child's teacher.)
>
>But Bill also rightly notes that:
>
>> This approach is labor-intensive but probably will work if there is a
>> decent amount of rapport between child and parent--or student and teacher,
>> as the case may be.
>
>And here lies the heart of the problem for most of us. With many 6-12
>English teachers lavishly loaded with 100-120 students on average (some with
>more ... in my first year, I had 160 students in five classes, Mon-Fri!),
>the 1-on-1 conference approach becomes almost impossible.


I had a feeling when I wrote the above that someone would object to my
prescription on the grounds that it's too labor-intensive. It's not too
labor-intensive for a mother who just wants to help one child, but as Paul
rightly points out, it may not be practical for a teacher who is working
with a class. I have not found it beyond reason when teaching in
enlightened programs that limit class sizes for remedial students, but that
is not the normal case.

However, the labor involved doesn't change the likelihood that teaching
editing skills by means of each student's own paper, while the student is
editing before submitting a final draft, is the best approach to the task.
(I say "likelihood" because I'm not aware of studies proving the claim.)
Fortunately, there are many other approaches besides one-to-one between the
teacher and every student. Here are some of them.

1. One-to-one between the teacher and selected students. I found this
especially effective when students were able to send me drafts by e-mail so
that I could work on them outside of class.

2. Limited one-to-one between the teacher and all students with a certain
problem or need. (You can see that this is limited in two ways--to students
with the problem and to just one or two problems per editing session.)

3. Peer editing. This is the one I used most frequently. It improved when I
learned that students must be taught how to peer edit. However, I retired
before pinning down exactly how to do that most successfully.

4. Sending students to the writing lab. The quality of help varies widely,
even within the same lab. It's also not fair to ask the lab to be
exclusively a "comma fixer." But the service can improve if the teachers
sending students to the lab work with the lab's personnel.

5. A library of written self-tutorials to assign to students who need them.
Isolated drill-and-kill may not help, but more sophisticated materials,
prepared in advance to hand out to students with previously identified
problems, should be able to help. As in No. 2 above, this approach has to
be limited to just one or two problems at a time. (I always envied teachers
who had developed such a library and wished I were organized enough to
develop my own. But I did have a few key materials.)

6. Full-class exercises with problems that all or almost all students have.
Here is where sentence combining and sentence imitation shine. For
instance, I have found sentence combining especially effective for teaching
students to improve their use of logical connectors such as repetition of
key works and insertion of transitions.

You can probably add your own ideas to this list. The point remains,
though, that it is possible to teach editing skills during the writing
process.

Bill

William J. McCleary
3247 Bronson Hill Road
Livonia, NY 14487
716-346-6859

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