Personally, I think we need to encourage more than one editing cycle.  When we
get down to paragraph and sentence-level considerations, we can help students
revise sentences for greater effectiveness--for example, by expanding some by
adding details like participial phrases, if relevant.  Johanna and others on
this listserv can give lots of good examples based on functional grammar, I'm
sure, having skimmed some of the previous posts.  In an ideal world, then and
only then would I work on punctuation and usage, which I personally think of
as the two major subcategories of "editing skills," along with spelling (and
then proofreading).

Mini-lessons can introduce grammatical concepts, but they don't guarantee
results.  One strategy I've used successfully with college students (teachers
and especially preservice teachers in my Grammar for Teachers course) is to
put a check mark in the margin of students' papers where there is something
that needs to be "corrected" (my second phase of editing).  I've then returned
these "final" papers, pointed out that nothing is ever quite final (even if
published!), and have the students work together in groups to try to figure
out what's "wrong," then fix the problems and turn the paper back in.  (I
forgot to say that the students have already tried to help each other edit
their papers before turning them in!  But they need the extra help of having
the trouble spots pointed out.)  I encourage students to use grammar
handbooks, but they don't always know what's "wrong," or at least they don't
know the name of the problem.

While the students are working in groups, I circulate among the groups,
helping them identify problems that no one in the group can figure out, giving
them names for problems that they may have identified and corrected without
knowing the handbook term, and so forth.  While this teaching strategy isn't
perfect either, working with a "final" draft and giving students one more
chance and HELP in improving the mechanics of it seems to be better than other
teaching strategies I've tried.  Perhaps I could/should use another color of
pen to put a check by sentences that could well be expanded with modifiers or
combined for greater effect, too, though this might be too much in one
session.  I work with students in an encouraging, non-punitive way, so they
feel that I'm their advocate rather than their adversary.  That makes a big
difference, too, I'm sure.  In short, my Grammar for Teachers class is also a
writing class where I help students learn to apply sentence composing and
revision strategies, plus editing skills, to their own writing.  I figure this
goes much farther toward helping them teach such skills and strategies to
their own students, though I haven't tried to do any follow-up research.

Connie Weaver

[log in to unmask] wrote:

> Connie,
>
> What skills fall under "editing skills" and how would you go about teaching
> them?
>
> Steve Cohen
> NYC