Original chapter: LINK
By Alina Galvão Spinillo
The Latin saying “Verba volant, scripta manent” translates to “spoken words fly away, written words remain,” emphasising the lasting nature of writing. But when we think about writing as a process that involves constant changes, its temporary nature becomes apparent. Alina Galvão Spinillo’s chapter focuses on the crucial role of revising in writing.
Revising is all about looking at your writing critically and making improvements. It’s like quality control for your text, ensuring it is clear, accurate, and effective. This process might involve minor tweaks or major rewrites, depending on what is needed to achieve a satisfactory final product.
Research shows that revision is a key part of writing, happening at various stages:
- Planning: Before writing starts.
- Drafting: As the text is being written.
- Post-drafting: After a draft is complete.
Studies have found that experienced writers, like secondary school students and adults, revise more extensively than beginners or younger students. Less experienced writers often need support from teachers or peers to engage in meaningful revision [LINK].
Who the text is for also influences the type of revisions children make [LINK]. Writers adjust their manuscripts differently depending on their audience. Understanding these aspects can help teachers guide their students more effectively. By encouraging frequent and thoughtful revisions, teachers can help students improve their writing skills and produce higher-quality pieces.
Revising writing: A practical guide for teachers
Text revision is an important part of writing, where the writer looks at their own manuscripts with fresh eyes. This process is driven by a sense of comparing what you wanted to say to your readers with what you’ve actually written. When differences are found, the writer makes necessary changes.
When revising, writers typically perform four main actions:
- Addition: Adding new words, sentences, or paragraphs.
- Deletion: Removing unnecessary parts.
- Substitution: Replacing one element with another.
- Rearrangement: Changing the order of words, sentences, or paragraphs.
Children typically favour substitution, while rearrangement is more common when they are making digital texts.
Revision tips for teachers
- Encourage metacognitive awareness: Teach students to think about their thinking. Encourage them to step back and review their manuscript critically. A great way to do this is through revision checklist sessions [LINK].
- Focus on audience: Help students consider who will read their text and how to best communicate their message to that audience. Setting publishing goals is a great way to do this [LINK]. Knowing their text will be read by someone specific can motivate them to make more thoughtful revisions.
- Practise different types of revisions: Have students ‘try out’ addition, deletion, substitution, and rearrangement craft moves. This builds flexibility in their writing skills [LINK].
Beginning writers often focus more on surface-level changes. With practice and guidance, they can learn to make deeper, meaning-level revisions. By incorporating these strategies into your teaching, you can help students develop stronger writing skills, ensuring their final drafts are polished and effective.
When to revise
Revision can occur at different stages of the writing process:
- Planning: This is the stage where writers generate ideas and organise their thoughts before drafting begins. Here, revisions happen in the writer’s mind as they decide what to include and how to structure their text [LINK]. Collaborative writing can be helpful at this stage, allowing writers to discuss and refine their ideas together [LINK and LINK].
- Drafting: During this stage, the writer is translating their ideas onto paper. Revisions made here can be called ‘online revisions’. This involves choosing the best words and sentence structures to convey the intended meaning [LINK]. This stage is critical for ensuring the text flows logically from one idea to the next.
- Reviewing and ‘trying things out’: This occurs after a draft is written. Writers review their text as their reader would, making changes to improve the overall quality. This stage can be called ‘deferred revision’. Revision checklist sessions are a great opportunity for reviewing [LINK].
Good revision practices
- Rereading while drafting: Studies show that rereading parts of your text aloud to friends while you are writing can help generate new ideas and improve the quality of the final product [LINK].
- Collaborative planning and revising: When children work in pairs to plan and revise a text, they tend to make more meaningful changes during planning and more genre-focused changes during post-drafting. Encouraging collaboration with friends can enhance young writers’ revision process [LINK].
The role of the audience when writing
When children write, their audience(s) play a crucial role. This audience can either be physically present while the writing is being made (such as classmates and teachers) and/or absent (town library visitors, strangers on a train).
- Collaborative writing and quality improvement: Studies have shown that when students have their classmates as audiences for their writing, the quality and quantity of their revision increases [LINK].
- Understanding through peer evaluation: Peer evaluations can help children write understandable texts. Regular class sharing sessions are particularly effective in improving text comprehensibility [LINK].
- Undertake revision checklist sessions: Teach your pupils how to give specific and constructive feedback [LINK].
- Balance individual and collaborative writing: Use a mix of individual and collaborative writing time [LINK]. Individual writing time helps students focus on their own writing, while collaborative writing time can introduce writers to new ideas and perspectives from their readers.
Students also set themselves publishing goals which involve them writing for an audience who is not physically present in the classroom [LINK]. Publishing goals influence children’s writing and revision process:
- Revising for a broader audience: When revising for a future reader, students are more likely to make changes that enhance clarity and coherence. Children make more meaningful revisions when they know their text is going to be read by someone outside their immediate circle.
- Improving through audience awareness: Children can improve their writing significantly when they are given time to think from the reader’s perspective [LINK].
Students learn to modify their writing based on their readers’ needs.
Practical tips for teachers
- Define the audience: Help students identify who the audience is going to be for class writing projects [LINK]. Have classroom discussions about what their audience(s) might need or expect from their texts. You can do this by setting the product goals (success criteria) for a class writing project collaboratively [LINK]. This will help students think more critically about their writing choices.
- Plan authentic ‘real-world’ writing projects: Plan a variety of class writing projects where students write for different audiences, such as letters to people of interest [LINK] or articles for a school magazine [LINK]. Such projects make the revision process more purposeful.
- Set specific revision goals: When asking students to revise their compositions, give them specific goals related to their audience. This is best done through revision checklist sessions [LINK].
- Use real-world examples: Show students examples of how you’ve made revisions to your text. This can provide a concrete model for students to follow.
By integrating these strategies into your teaching, you can help students become more aware of their audience, leading to better and more thoughtful writing.