Revising: An Essay

Revising their work requires students to use all of their skills. Instructors identify the skills each student needs to practice in order to write an effective essay. Below, one instructor, Cassidy, describes how she worked with a seventh grade student, Samirah.

First Draft

Technical Skill: Complete Sentences

“I knew Samirah was overwhelmed by all that she wanted to express. Her run-on sentences made her writing unclear and chaotic. Every day she found three run-ons in her journal entry to rewrite. It really paid off when she went to develop her ideas in her second draft. She only had one run-on sentence in the entire essay.”

Expressive Skill: Focus

“At first, Samirah wanted to write about everything we did during activities. She tried to describe two hours of robot-making at the MIT Museum in a one-page journal entry! I asked her to re-write the entry and focus on developing one idea: whether her finished robot was a success. The work she did focusing journal entries helped when she was writing her persuasive essay. When I told her to focus each paragraph on one point, she knew exactly what I meant.”

Second Draft

Social & Emotional Skills: Taking her ideas seriously

“Samirah had a lot of great ideas, but she wrote to fill pages instead of taking what she had to say seriously and developing her ideas. After the first draft, I asked Samirah to explain to me what she meant about washing the uniforms. She gave all these specific details about how hard it was for her family because they didn’t have a washing machine at home. ‘Write it all in there!’ I exclaimed. Her second draft really shows how much more invested she became in her writing.”

Writing Process

“Samirah needed to learn that each stage of the process required different skills and a different attitude. From the first day when we wrote about portraits, Samirah cringed at any sort of feedback—she wanted to be perfect the first time out. I told her that her first draft was perfect—but that it was just a draft. She became persistent and diligent in revising her second draft, understanding that it was part of the writing process. Her hard work paid off!”

Final Draft

Every day, we have to wear a uniform. It is a problem because we have to wash them a lot. They’re a light color and they get dirty quickly. Some students only have two pairs of uniforms. Washing them often is difficult because some students have to go to the laundromat because they don’t have a washing machine at home. Washing everyday wastes their money. We shouldn’t wear uniforms so that we don’t have to do as many washes.