Writing is hard.  Writing about writing is harder.  This seems to be all that comes to mind as I try to write about the students’ writing.  I know how a student feels when I see her staring out the window during Writer’s Workshop – not writing.  In these times, I often tell students to just write what they are thinking to get those clogging ideas out, allowing the fresh ones in. (Hence the opening line to this paragraph.)

If writing is hard for students, revision feels impossible! Many students feel that once they have written their piece, it is done.  Yet revision is essential to all writing whether it is just checking for errors or completely overhauling an idea.  Currently, students are working on a short narrative piece where their main lesson is to practice revision techniques that help to focus the piece and keep students from straying off topic while also “exploding” ideas that need more detail to enhance meaning.  All of this requires revision, and lots of it.

One revision method is called “looping”. Looping is an exercise many writers use to narrow the focus of a piece. Often, in early drafts we write anything and everything that comes to mind about our topic. As we revise, we want to “zoom in” on only the most important and interesting parts of our narrative in order to discover our PURPOSE for writing. So, after the students had responded to a prompt, they were asked to reread their work to find just one sentence that they were particularly proud of, thought was interesting, felt was the most exciting part, or understood to be an important moment in their story. Here are examples of what they discovered:

• I gave the driver my money, and watched the city of Portland disappear in the fog.
• ​“Where the heck are the Dippin’ Dots?”
• I shot them a look and they stopped laughing.
• I saw the word “COURT” written in the front.
• Right then and there, I decided to see my sister.
• An elbow came out of nowhere and whacked me in the face.
• I have London still but I have another horse too.
• I start to sob so I grabbed the children and begin to kiss their heads, telling them it’s going to be okay that and we are going to find a new house.
• “He’s in surgery. Car crash.  Nothing too big, maybe a burst appendix.”
• The dark, black clouds sparkled and spit electricity.
• “Gentlemen, we have a rat problem.”
• He makes us do work, hard work.

From here, students were asked to start over, using just their chosen line as the first sentence in their story.  (They actually did this three times over the same number of days.)  Afterward, students felt that they had more clear and purposeful writing and that they were more focused on the meaningful parts of their stories.

And while they have essentially written 3 drafts already, over the next week, they will continue their revisions through teacher conferences, My Access Intellimetric feedback, and peer Critical Friends groups.

Is a writer’s work ever done? Probably not. But as students revise and become more satisfied with their work, they realize that good writing can have a rather elaborate process of revision and it likely includes input from others.  And while there is always room for improvement, there comes a time in the process when students can put aside their revision efforts because they feel assured that they have presented their meaning to the best of their ability and they can say that they are “done.”