A simple problem has long prevented students from revising their papers to correct mistakes with relative clauses: they can’t identify those clauses. Writing Reviser eliminates that problem. We highlight all the relative pronouns in an essay and present arrows pointing toward the word to which it relates. Students simply follow
Too often beginning writers revise their work without a clear sense of purpose. Sadly, that often results in a paper that becomes different rather than better, a process akin to someone blindly twisting and re-twisting a Rubik’s cube, uniformed by a larger strategy. The process can be painful to watch.
One of the easiest ways to lose a reader is to write a series of sentences with the exact same structure: “See Spot run. Watch him jump. Pet his head.” Compare that juvenile effect to one in which the student purposefully varies her sentence lengths: “Sitting in an expensive restaurant,
“Prefer active voice” may be the single most frequently dispensed injunction to improve writing. Strunk and White, George Orwell, and all student handbooks of the past 50 years extol the virtue of active verbs. But two problems often go unremarked: Students cannot reliably identify passive constructions in their own work.
Open the Statistics feature in the free Writing Reviser Google Doc Add-on, and you’ll see an elaborate but easy-to-read analysis of your entire essay. It’s the writerly equivalent of a blood test report, except that instead of listing your cholesterol level and lipid profile, we diagnose statistics crucial to the revision process.
Autonomy leads to engagement Research supports time-on-task as a proven strategy in developing reading skills. Studies show that students’ time spent engaged directly correlates to achievement levels. The more they are engaged, the more they learn. The key word is engaged. Simply allocating time to read during the school day
All learners have comfort zones. I find it enjoyable, for example, to grapple with the complexities and rhetorical puzzles that James Joyce offers up in his novel Ulysses. But we also know our discomfort zones— concepts or subject areas that make us nervous or unsettled. Give me anything written by
We called her the Diagram Queen. She was a small woman, probably no taller than five feet, but her students looked upon her as a giant. Each day, she would greet us with a smile and utter these simple instructions: “Students, take out a sheet of paper. Before we start
I don’t need to make the case that providing students with models of good writing can be a powerful tool for improving their work. That’s why I want to feature in this Buried Treasures post the Argument Writing section from inContext, our massive network of terms, definitions, and activities that
For English language arts, any discussion of Buried Treasures would be incomplete without a mention of the research wizard from the Writing Navigator series. The four products in this series guide students through the writing process (planning, drafting, revising, and publishing). But students who wish to support their ideas with quotations
