Revising and Editing With the Six Traits

Last year, I had a bunch of third and fourth graders who absolutely loved writing. The problem was that they were skipping steps in the writing process and completely forgetting about revising and editing. They were very quick to point out that they had indeed revised and edited because they had looked up those two words in the dictionary...

It was then that I decided to introduce a new revising and editing strategy. Since they were familiar with the Six Traits, I wanted to use those in the new strategy.

I went out and bought a bunch of different coloured pens. They had to be green, blue and purple to match the VOICES wall in the classroom (there's a reason for my colour-matching madness, I swear!)

So the next time they were writing, I introduced the brand new revising and editing pens. Here's what they had to do:

1. Use the purple pens to check for sentence fluency. Underline the first word of every sentence. They had to change some of the words if they started many sentences the same way. Some of them even started a tally on the bottom of their page : ).

2. Use the blue pens to check their word choice. This was where they would cross out many of their constant 'said's and use the thesaurus to help them out. They could also use the blue pen to use figurative language and add descriptive details.

3. FINALLY, they could pull out their beloved dictionary and look up the words they didn't know and write them in green.

This made my life so much easier because I could just glance at a student's work and know if they had revised and edited their work. It was also easier for them to remember the steps involved in the writing process. They knew that their page had to have all three different colours on it before they could move on to their final draft.

A quick glance at these two samples shows that both students have revised and edited their work.

The best part? If they forgot what to look for, they could take their writing and their coloured pen to the VOICES wall and read the statements for that trait! It was a check-list that they could walk up to any time. Please ignore the fact that the wall is in its early stages... I can't seem to find a more recent version of it. 

I hope you can use this strategy in your own classroom!