Archive for the ‘Writing about Writing’ Category

Revision is Not Editing

Revision is Not Editing

In Brave Writer, we separate the ideas of revision and editing. Revision is “casting new vision” for the original piece of writing. It’s a “re-imagining” of the original content. You have what you want to say, now you are considering all the various ways it can be said.

Your freewrite/draft is the jet stream of thought. It’s all of it rushing out of the writer onto the page willy-nilly.

Revision is not, now, taking that freewrite/draft and fixing commas or identifying run-on sentences. It’s not addressing tone or spelling mistakes. Those practices fall under the category of “copy-editing.”

Revision is that drastic over-haul type work that literally changes the draft sometimes so completely, the original is hardly recognizable in it any more (except maybe some sentences or the germ of the idea). Revision is where you hunker down and look at specific thoughts expressed insufficiently in the draft, and then determine how to expand them, how to enhance them, how to deepen the content or insight or facts-basis.

Revision IS writing.

In fact, most writers would say that revision is the craft, is the heart of being a writer.

What I find in parents (and even in those who claim to be writing instructors) is a tendency to skip this part of the process. They move right to editing and call it revision.

When asked to give revision notes or support, they draw a blank or they praise what’s good or they give general comments like, “Be sure you think about your audience” or “It’s a good idea to make sure your points are in a solid sequence.”

This kind of general feedback isn’t helpful to writers. What helps is to become a child’s creative partner. What you want to do, what you need to learn how to do, is how to create a dynamic partnership of idea generation.

For instance, you might see a flat-footed opening line (note: they are all flat-footed in the first draft – it’s completely rare that the first line stays the same in well revised writing). Your job isn’t to point out that it is flat-footed or could be revised. It isn’t to assign the task of making it better to your child. It’s literally to brainstorm ideas for improvements. Let’s say the child is writing about white water rafting, you might try something like this:

“I wonder how we can make this opening line grab the reader’s attention. Let me think, let me think. What if we start with the experience—Let’s get in the boat. Are you in it? What’s happening now? Close your eyes. What do you see? Blue? What shades?”

You’re jotting things down as they come out of your child’s mouth. Then you say:

“How about the water? I can imagine there’s a spray. Is there? Yes? Where did it hit? What is a water spray like? Does it remind you of anything? Oh good one! The spray of a garden hose when your brother aims it at you. Good one! Yes! Let’s jot that down.”

You’re wool-gathering. You’re collecting

  • images,
  • experiences,
  • thoughts,
  • curiosities,
  • comments,
  • ideas.

You aren’t telling your child what to do. You’re helping your child think freshly about what is already on the page. You are providing the dialog partner the way you would in conversation:

“Then what happened? Oh wait, how did you get there? That must have been amazing! What did your brother say?”

But now, you are focused on writing and you are providing the conversational partnership that your child’s writer needs. You are thinking in writing categories but having discussions about it (natural ones). You aren’t an English teacher. You are an interested friend, partner, ally.

Do you see the difference? Stop the generalizations and get into conversations. Help get those words out.

Then, when you go back to that opening sentence, you have a selection of things to choose from that might grab the reader’s attention. Together, you can find the one and write it in a way that makes magic.

Curious about Brave Writer?

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice, Language Arts, Writing about Writing | 5 Comments »

How Writing Is Like Sewing

Brave Writer How Writing Is Like Sewing

A fundamental confusion exists around how to teach writing. I’ve spent two decades looking for just the right metaphor to explain how a parent facilitates writing growth. Then the other day, on the phone, I stumbled upon a perfect metaphor.

Let’s look at learning to use a sewing machine.

A sewing machine makes it possible to create all kinds of sewing products—anything from hemming a pair of pants, to constructing a quilt, to producing an evening gown. The machine doesn’t do it for you. You have to know how to use the machine, and you have to develop skills: how to sew straight seams or how to drop in a sleeve or how to gather a drape. You need to learn how to create casings, and how to use the zig zag, and what the tension dial does.

When learning the skills needed for sewing, students start with scrap fabric. They don’t pick a dress pattern and then sit down to the machine. Usually they have to learn how to thread the needle and bobbin, they have to sew lots of straight lines and learn how to turn corners and how to backstitch the end of a seam so that it doesn’t unravel.

No one can learn all she needs to know in one sitting or even one year of sewing. There are levels of skill that are gained over time, as comfort with the machinery, and dexterity, and familiarity with the properties of sewing are internalized and mastered.

How Writing is like Sewing

But it is possible at each stage of development to introduce a little project. At first, these might be things like bean bags (squares) or a string dress (no pattern, but the dress uses casings). As the student gets comfortable, making an a-line dress for a doll from a pattern becomes possible and a thrill! Producing a doll quilt is the first step toward making one for a bed.

Eventually, the student of sewing learns tricks to make the process easier and faster. They can size up a pattern to know if it’s too difficult or too easy, and can make changes to make the pattern work.

Sewing is not about the dress patterns or quilts. Sewing is a set of skills that can be applied to patterns.

Let’s drive home the analogy to writing.

Firstly, the original writing process is discovered using scrap language—whatever is in the mind and mouth of the child at the time. The writing is interest-driven and exploratory. The child is gaining facility with the practice of accessing language, ideas, insights, and information from within and getting those words to the page in a variety of ways (all different styles of “language stitching”).

Secondly, the child learns to use the mechanics of writing similar to learning to use the sewing machine. How to thread the bobbin, how much pressure to put on the pedal, how to backstitch, how to zigzag, how to set up the buttonholer—these skills enable sewing. Similarly, the functional skills needed to run the machinery of writing are spelling, grammar, punctuation, handwriting and/or typing. And in Brave Writer, we believe that in the beginning that’s best learned through copywork (someone else’s writing).

Thirdly, students create writing projects which are the dress patterns of writing. Now that older children understand how the machine works and can use it with evolving skill, they can manage the demands of the machine, so it’s time to make a dress or placemat or quilt!

How Writing is like Sewing

In writing, once the student knows how to find language within, knows how to get that language to the page, and how to handwrite, expand, revise, and edit it, he or she is ready to “make something” —to write a report or letter, to write a poem or a dialog, to write a story or ad copy, to write an essay.

The point is—don’t hand your brand-new-to-writing student the equivalent of an evening gown dress pattern and expect it to turn out right on the first try, just because there are “clear instructions.” Writing is a set of skills practiced independently of assignments, leading up to developmentally appropriate writing projects that reinforce and expand evolving skills.

3 components of a complete writing program:

  1. Mastery of the original writing process (Growing Brave Writers)
  2. Rehearsing the mechanics of writing (Quill, Dart, Arrow, Boomerang, Slingshot)
  3. Writing projects to put mechanics and original writing together (Jot it Down, Partnership Writing, Building Confidence, Help for High School, and Online Classes)
Brave Writer Products

Tags:
Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW products, Writing about Writing | 2 Comments »

It really is enough

The tricky part of homeschooling, and particularly writing, is that you can’t see the growth as it happens. Looking back shows you the growth. But looking back happens when they head off to college… or Europe, or get married. That feels a teensy bit late.

In other words, the very thing you need to reassure you that you are doing a good job with your kids is invisible to you as you do that “good job with your kids.” You’re required to put your faith in the process, rather than confidence in observable results. (Or, alternatively, you have to change how you measure what you see.)

  • It’s enough to read aloud to your kids, to have your children copy some of those words into a little notebook, to have them take a stab at writing some of those words without looking while you dictate them aloud. It’s enough if this happens once a week or 20 times in a year, and some years even fewer times.
  • It’s enough to catch a few of their brilliant thoughts or quirky ideas in writing for them, once in a while, so they know that what’s inside them deserves to be on paper too.
  • It’s enough to linger at dinner, discussing some topic like the puns in Seinfeld or why Pocahontas the Disney movie is both so good you want to keep watching it but so bad (if you compare it to history) that you feel guilty for loving it.
  • It’s enough to sing to your kids at bedtime once in a while or listen to their stories or to tell them some ridiculous saga you made up that goes on and on and stops making sense after a few weeks but you both love just the same.
  • It’s enough if your kids read and read and read the same book series over and over again and it seems like they will never discover another author as wonderful as JK Rowling or Brian Jacques or Suzanne Collins or Ian Fleming or Jeff Kinney. One day you’ll notice… oh hey! She’s reading another book by someone else.
  • It’s enough if you listen to what your kids say, if you have big juicy conversations about the stuff that interests them, if you laugh at funny sounding words and use absurdly big ones around them just to trick them and tickle their linguistic imaginations.
  • It’s enough if they read a little poetry, look up a few song lyrics, memorize a couple tongue twisters, learn to tell a few really funny jokes, and figure out the delicious humor of Will Shakespeare in one of his comedies (in a movie of course).
  • It’s enough if they cast their thoughts onto a page, freely, attending only to the ideas or the sound of the words, and know they have a receptive audience in you.
  • It’s enough if they play with other writing forms, if they learn how to mop up their own mechanics, if they attempt half a dozen essays in high school, figuring out what it means to have a point of view that they assert and then how to back it up because it matters to them.

We make it so difficult. We expect our kids to match some other agenda than the one that delivers them happily into an authentic writing life.

Less is more—less hand-wringing, fewer assignments, less control, less nagging, fewer criteria.

More is more—more conversations, more reading, more delight, more time, more space, more passion for language, more opportunities to play with words, language.

I’m here to help when you lose your nerve or your way.

Posted in Brave Writer Lifestyle, Homeschool Advice, Writing about Writing | 2 Comments »