Middle school students need to watch experienced writers think their way through revising and editing. The experienced writers in this case would probably be teachers who have written on the same topic as the students. With a rough draft projected so students can see it -- using devices like a document camera, an LCD projector, an interactive white board and computer -- the writer makes changes, corrections and improvements while explaining to the students the reasons for the revisions and edits. The modeling should demonstrate both content changes and mechanical edits. As students become familiar with the thinking, they can suggest changes. Later, students try to apply the same thinking to their own writing.
To understand how revision works, students need to see the effect major changes can have on piece of writing. To do that, they can read well-known stories that have been told multiple ways. For example, they can look at a fairy tale that has been retold from the point of view of a different character. Working in groups, students can chart the differences in versions. Then, with prompting from the teacher, they can begin to analyze the effect the changes have on the story itself, the tone and the audience. Seeing the effect these revisions have will help students to mold their own writing for different purposes.
Students need feedback as they improve their writing. One way to accomplish that is through peer revision. Students trade rough drafts with a classmate, read each other’s work, ask questions and suggest changes. To guide revising and editing, peer groups use checklists or rubrics to keep the discussions focused on key areas for improvement such as adding details and organizing information. Reading the drafts out loud to each other can help students listen for voice and appropriate word choice. The checklists can also guide the groups to look for common errors including run-on sentences, fragments and subject-verb agreement.
A handful of different-colored highlighters can help middle school students see the need for sentence variety in their writing. Using a draft of their own writing, students highlight in one color all their simple, declarative sentences. Then, using a different color, they highlight all the sentences that begin with a phrase or a clause. They use another color for all their compound sentences and fourth and fifth colors for all the sentences that end with question marks or exclamation points. In the end, students should see a variety of colors on the page. If they don’t, they revise to add new types of sentences.