How To Teach Self-Editing

In writing, it is important that you know how to edit your own work. The best thing that you can teach your student is to see their own mistakes in their writing. Editing is essential in every writing work. Even professional writers edit their own work for it to effectively create an impact on their reader. Editing allows cleaning and removing unnecessary elements on your writing. It gives way to corrections on grammar, sentence structure, word choice, spelling and punctuations. Editing gives assurance of an excellent written material.

  • Teach your students to analyze written material. One way to teach self-editing is selection analysis. First, take a passage on a book and start discussing it to your class or group. Then make them rewrite the passage by rephrasing it. Let them analyze what they have written and see some grammatical mistakes and check on the spelling as well.
  • Be firm about consistency. When letting your students edit their work, one of the main things they should learn to look out for is whether their text is consistent: that is, with regards to grammar (for example: do they consistently maintain first-person narration, or do they suddenly switch to third person?) and the details of the story.
  • Teach your students the proper mechanics in writing. In teaching how to edit their own work, you must tell them every important thing about writing. Let them identify and study the proper mechanics in writing and practice it all the time. Once they have read their own writing they can easily identify their own mistakes if the know exactly the mechanics for writing. It is essential to avoid using “ly” in the end of you word, find ways to avoid adverbs. Check on the writing whether it is easily understood by the readers and does not create any confusion. Use proper punctuations for every sentence.
  • Be careful about dialogue. Let your student read their story and identify each dialogue that’s been assigned for each character. Let them notice if they did not put any breaks on it. They must identify that the character shouldn’t be talking too as making a speech while they are just making a conversation. Let the character talk in a conversational tone and avoid creating a long paragraph dialogue.
  • Make them do some final assessments on their work. After teaching the necessary things in editing their own writing, let them make a final look at it. You could also assign them to exchange their work with the others so they could do peer assessment. Then you can start checking each individual work by discussing the mistakes on the material. Discussion is a good base in learning and editing a written work.

Encourage your students to read more books like novels and stories to help them improve in their own writing. Making them exposed on every kind of story writing will develop their own skills. It will help them identify easily the mistakes on the writing that they will make. The best to self-edit your work is to give yourself time to leave it for a while. Then you can go back and read it again when your mind is all refreshed and you can easily identify which one to consider for revision.


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