Writing Blogs

When I looked for blogs this week, I wanted to focus on finding posts that talk about the writing process and editing/revising. I find these to be tougher areas to teach and I was hoping to find something that could help spark ideas for me.

On Edutopia, I found a blog post called Creating a Writers' Workshop in a Secondary Classroom, and thought it would be a great read. In this post, Shelby Scoffeild talked about how she started using writing workshops within her high school English classes. Her first two ideas were the best and most helpful bits of advice that  I never thought of. First she states that workshops should be done in a station format. She says that her classroom is set up into stations with a topic for students to focus on. When class starts, students come in to find an assignment on the board. From there they find a station they wish to work at and focus on. The stations range from “Learning how to Analyze” and “Structure an Essay” to “Reading Out Loud” and “MLA Formatting”. This leads to the second word of advice, let students pick what they focus on. I like this because students are meant to pick what they focus on based on where they have weakness in their writing.I like that this format of a writing workshop because it gives students the chance to reflect on themselves and their writing. Scoffeild goes on to tell about each station and how they can be used to improve writing for students.

The second blog I read, The Thesis Whisperer, is written by many different teachers on writing. The post I read, Doing a Copy Edit of Your Thesis, Dr. Jay Daniel Thompson talks about ways of editing your work. This can be linked with Scoffeild’s idea of using stations for workshop writing. When students finish writing and to the point of editing and rewriting their paper, Thompson gives a set of steps or topics to pay attention to when editing your writing. He states that grammar is important, but reminds readers to focus on the structure and topic of the paper. If we forget about the topic of our papers, they could fall apart. I could go back and edit all my work and have no grammar mistakes, but is that more important than my understanding of the passage?

I find that when I was taught writing  and when I’ve seen it taught in classes, we automatically look at the big picture. We look at what we need to have and try to reach that goal all at once. When we look at writing we break it into sections and paragraphs to be more organized, in a way we should be doing this with the writing process. There are so many different parts of writing we take for granted or overlook, for me one can be MLA formatting or whatever formatting I’m using at that time. I hope to one day use the station format of a writing workshop. I think it would greatly help students to break down their writing and editing process by focusing on one thing at a time.