Posts Tagged ‘revision’
Finding Clarity: The Value of Writing a Discovery Draft
My student, a high school senior stared at the paper in front of him, then up at me, then back down at his paper before dropping his head in his hands with all the drama of an annoyed seventeen year old, and mumbled, “What do I even do with this? I don’t know how to…
Read MoreTackling Edits: How to Revise & Cut Thousands of Words to Improve Your Writing
My eyeballs hurt, a deep ache after finishing the micro-edit on The Fiddler’s Son. This latest draft is now getting some well-deserved “drawer time” as it goes off to two beta readers to help me with yet another macro-edit. Macro-edit? Micro edit? What are these terms? They’re actually somewhat new to me, too, but they…
Read MoreHow to Use Word Clouds to Guide Your Revision
We all tend to have our favorite “go to” words that we like to use, but often, we’re not even aware of them. During the revision process, searching out these words and replacing or deleting them can be a challenge when we’re not even sure what they are. Thankfully, online word cloud programs can help…
Read MoreWhat do you do with Feedback?
You shared some of your writing with a friend or group. People read it, wrote about it, gave you comments. Some of them made you do a happy dance around your room, some made you want to toss your computer out the window, and others just didn’t even make sense. What do you do with…
Read MoreWhy feedback can help with early revisions
Getting feedback on your writing is the (sometimes scary) process of sharing your writing and asking others for help. You might be asking why this is important? You’re already a pretty great writer, or you wouldn’t be here, so why do you need others to read your writing? Let me share a few reasons: 1. Readers will…
Read MoreProofreading vs. Editing: What’s the Difference?
When reading one another’s writing, high school students will almost always point out grammatical errors, misspelled words or typos before anything else. Perhaps its because they “know” how to fix those things. They’re easy to identify for good writers, but this is not editing though its part of the editing process. This is called proofreading.…
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