PEDAGOGY As a teacher of writing, I would maintain that the best type of writing is rewriting. Amateur writers from any year group will normally fall into one of two categories in regards to their own work. The first is the group that see the best writers in the class, or the best authors of their favourite books and believe the success is almost a magic act whereby these people can instantly achieve brilliant prose. The other group are those that work hard on their writing and upon handing it in to the teacher, are unable to redraft anything as they see it only as correcting their errors. I think every teacher has been in the position when a child from their class has handed in a final piece of writing at the end of a unit of work and then felt that sense of disappointment when that child’s work doesn’t flow from sentence to sentence, or perhaps ideas lack development. This, unfortunately, was how I came to realise the importance of redrafting that is built into the writing process – not just something to be done vaguely at the end of a completed piece of work. Nor should it be something that is relegated to simply correcting spellings, commas and capital letters. In order for children to redraft their word choice, sentence detail and paragraph coherency, they need explicit instruction, teacher modelling and a carefully crafted sequence of activities. In addition, I always teach the distinctive difference between redrafting and editing. Both improve writing, but only redrafting focusses on the elements of writing I mentioned above. Editing is about reinforcing the basics of
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writing: punctuation, spelling and capitalisation. Initially, children need to be guided on the redrafting and editing journey, as it is one that, if done incorrectly, or rushed, will only result in very small gains. I hasten to add here that this process of redrafting is built in throughout a unit of work, so that the children, over a course of two to three weeks, have experience of redrafting and editing small paragraphs, which they have no ownership over, as well as their peers’ work and finally their own writing. Children need to develop their confidence in improving their own work and this takes time. To do this, I always begin with a short paragraph that I create, which includes perfectly edited writing – no spelling or punctuation errors. However, there are plenty of undeveloped sentence examples, or sentences that don’t flow from one to the other. This allows children to focus only on the redrafting process. When presented with an anonymous ‘Child A’ paragraph, I then introduce children to a sequence for redrafting; I begin with the small, wordbased changes, then build up to sentence development and paragraph flow. At each step, I also model the same point of redrafting using a different, but similar, anonymous piece – let’s call it ‘Child B’. This is crucial, as it allows me to model the redrafting skill and speak as a writer, explaining my thought process and the consideration of the reader as I go, therefore developing the children’s metacognition.
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