A teacher shares her technique for improving student writing: add detail. Forget organization, cutting, and adding more information. Get students to focus only on adding more detail to information already included. Examples are given. (MT)

Presents a program for effective revision procedures based on five criteria: amount/kind of detail, appropriate emphasis of content, logical progression, stylistic appropriateness, and mechanical accuracy. (PD)

Recommends that teachers concentrate on explaining explicit procedures for revising style, because many novice writers interpret revision as only proofreading for typing or spelling errors. Provides a set of guidelines for stylistic revision that help students identify problems with passive verbs, nominalizations, wordiness and imprecise language.…

Argues that the use of editing in the classroom involves the students in restructuring, revision, and rethinking as well as correction, extension, and deletion. (HOD)

A teacher describes what happens when professional writers are invited into his college composition classroom to talk about and show the processes they employ in revising their work, and reports that students benefit not only by hearing about but also by actually seeing successive drafts. In the class, the students begin the semester by analyzing…

Ten deaf college freshmen and a comparison group of five hearing students participated in a study of a method to identify long pauses in written composition that have important statistical properties. Subjects first wrote two initial drafts of short stories they had viewed on video tape. Later, they revised and recopied their two originals and one…

Indicates that using highlighters to mark errors produced a 76% class improvement in removing comma errors and a 95.5% improvement in removing apostrophe errors. Outlines two teaching procedures, to be followed before introducing this tool to the class, that enable students to remove errors at this effective rate. (JD)

The article describes an approach by which word processing helps to solve some of the writing problems of learning disabled students. Aspects considered include prewriting, drafting, revising, and completing the story. (CL)

Outlines a procedure to help students revise their writing. (JL)

These guidelines for teaching editing skills to secondary students with hearing impairments focus on: (1) revision, in which students review and refine the content, ideas, and form of their writing; and (2) proofreading and copy editing, in which students examine grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and spelling. Ways to utilize peers as…

Rather than giving basic writing students handbook and workbook exercises to direct their proofreading, teachers can use a monitoring system that teaches the students to recognize problems and to systematically monitor and eliminate the difficulties. After completing two or three assignments that include several drafts, students copy out all the…

A teacher of secondary learning disabled students describes an effective way of teaching grammar, mechanics, and usage by focusing on revising and editing of the students' own work. (CL)

A text's meaning is, in part, independent of its form. Reading, most of the time, is taking meaning--not words--from the printed page, while proofreading requires attention to form rather than meaning. The author notes that: (1) a meaningful passage is easier to read than one with less meaning; (2) errors in oral reading usually do not obscure a…

A study examined whether self-evaluation of writing should precede peer evaluation, and explored effective strategies for peer evaluation of writing. Seventy-six advanced placement English students in a Raleigh, North Carolina, high school were divided into experimental and control groups. The control group participated in peer evaluation of…

Word processing does not, in itself, teach revision. Students with incomplete revision strategies will not begin revising at a higher level simply by using a word processor. New computer strategies for teaching revision are needed--revision strategies that use the computer to reorganize, elaborate, and strengthen what has already been written. For…