Last week, I met with a former student to review her essay for her graduate school application.  The essay had good content but needed revision to make it stronger and editing to take care of grammatical and mechanical errors.  During the course of our conversation, she mentioned how she had learned all of this stuff – at this point, we were discussing the use of the semi-colon – but really hadn’t paid attention.  Now she needed this information.  Also, she never thought of revision as something useful; you wrote the paper and the teacher made comments.  Well, I had a hand in that, because at the time that I taught her, her 9^th and 12^th grade English courses, I was still in the stage of giving all of the comments and the students making the changes because I said so.  I had not learned how to make comments that sparked thoughtful choices and I did not approach revision as a means to bring out the best in the writing.  In short, I was approaching writing from the standpoint of most literature teachers and not from the standpoint of a teacher of writing, which is my viewpoint now.

Revision is such an important process.  If I were teaching now, and when I have the opportunity to work with teachers, I stress the point of writing in drafts.  If students come to the writing knowing that they are going to make revisions to improve their writing, it is far less painful for them.  It is a shift for the teacher, too, because she or he is not expecting the first draft to be a polished draft.  It is a draft in which the student discovers what she or he has to say about the topic.  Some people are able to stay on topic and write a draft that just needs fine-tuning; most people write a draft that meanders around the topic, trying to discover what is most important. 

In our discussion of her essay, we talked about making the writing more powerful.  For example, putting some pertinent and poignant information at the end of the sentence, actually at the end of the paragraph and offsetting it from the main sentence by use of a colon.  None of this did I say to her when she was my student 10 years ago.  Thank goodness, I have spent the time learning and growing as a teacher of writing through my work with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the scoring of AP English Literature and Composition exams, and the Masters of Arts Writing Program at Rowan University.

I work with many teachers who do not see the need to teach writing.  Some of them think that the students are supposed to come to them already fully informed in grammar and mechanics (from elementary and middle school instruction) and they should just teach them how to write a literary analysis, unfortunately usually in a five-paragraph essay format.  This results in there being no growth in the students’ writing over the course of four years, or at least not until senior year when teachers are mindful of the type of writing that the students may need to do in college. 

In the model that I am currently proposing to my staff, students do come to the high school with the basics.  But our job over the next four years is to advance their writing so that it becomes the powerful tool of communication that it can be.  Using textual support and examples to support an opinion are important, but so is knowing the power of short sentences and long, complex sentences, the power of the comma, the semi-colon, the colon, and the period.  This calls for the teaching of less literature for the sake of literature and more reading of literature, fiction and non-fiction, for a model of good writing and then actually writing to try to incorporate the techniques.  An ambitious endeavor on my part, but well worth the effort for the students.