Revising

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

• What does polishing your writing really mean?

If you have been working on a story or other piece of writing, you most likely have worked through the writing process to list ideas and organize the ideas into sentences and paragraphs.

Your first effort is called a draft. When you've completed your draft, you're not done yet!

Now, it's time to make your writing even better, or polish it off!

Writers need to polish or revise their work to make their writing better and more enjoyable for the reader.

When you read your writing, stop after each sentence, and ask yourself:

• Does that make sense?
• Is there any way I might make it better?

If so, make some changes! Don't say it's done until it's the best (and most interesting) you can make it!

Look at the chart below to learn the difference between revising and editing:

• What differences do you see?

You can see from this chart that revising is making changes to the writing to make it clearer and more interesting.

Editing is making corrections to mistakes.

In this lesson, we're focusing on revising to make writing more interesting.

When revising, you want to reread your sentences and look at each word carefully to see if you can replace a word with a better one, or if words could be moved around or removed.

For example, "I like ice cream because it is sweet." could be revised to, "I enjoy the sweet and creamy taste of ice cream."

The substitution included changing "like" to "enjoy" because it makes the sentence more personal and fun.

Watch this great overview of revising from Teaching Without Frills, titled, Writing a Personal Narrative: Revising for Kids:

Continue on to the Got It? section for some more practice!