The Red Pencil is Your Students' Best Friend

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If you have taken a writing workshop with me or who are familiar with Teaching the Story, you know that I always stress a positive approach to revision. DevoKids, a Christian website dedicated to providing spiritual inspiration, fun activities, and writing instruction for young people, is now featuring my article on this topic.


A funny thing happened as I worked with Terri Kelly, the editor of the website. Neither she nor I gave the article a final proof before it went live. As a result, we had three more rounds of revision before we finally got it right. That goes to show you that even professional writers and editors have to run through several cycles of write-read-revise before they're ready to hit "publish!"

The article is written for young writers; I hope you will share it in your classroom or with your home school students.

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Red Pencil Advice from Chekhov

"To write a story you need five or six days, during which time you must be thinking about it every moment, otherwise you'll never be able to frame good sentences. Before it reaches the page, every sentence must spend two days in the brain, lying perfectly still and putting on weight. It goes without saying, of course, that I'm too lazy to mind my own rule, but I do recommend it to you young writers, all the more so because I have experienced its beneficent results firsthand and know that the rough drafts of all true artists are a mess of deletions and corrections, marked up from top to bottom in a patch-work of cuts and insertions that are themselves recrossed out and mangled." –Anton Chekhov in How to Write Like Chekhov, edited by Pero Brunello and Lena Lanček, quoted in Writer's Digest, February, 2009.

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The Red Pencil is Avi’s Best Friend Too

As many of you who have taken my "Red Pencil" workshop know, I believe that teachers must communicate to their students that real writers revise. This was confirmed when I heard Avi, one of my favorite authors, say at the South Carolina Reading Association that he revises each of his books 60-70 times! That's a fact to dangle in front of all your students. Here are other gems I gleaned that day; I hope you will share them with your colleagues and in your classroom:

• "Your primary means to teach writing is to teach reading."
  
• "Kids are impatient. They don't want to do the hard work of revision. It may look OK on the computer, but in fact it's not."
  
• "Unless the writing is clear, engaging & interesting, the reader won't turn the page."
  
• "At some point a person begins to think like a writer…when they have the capacity to see what's missing and add to it."
  
• "No surprises for the writer? No surprises for the reader."
  
• "Teaching reading and writing is like teaching a second language. When kids begin to write, they write like they speak; the grammar of talking is different than the grammar of writing."
  

And my favorite:

• "Want to get higher grades? Read a book every week. Guaranteed."
  

This picture is proof that I can't go to a reading conference without buying a book—especially when signed by the author!

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