Polishing the Paper

Only 2 more chapters left in Gallagher's book. The 8th chapter is called "Polishing the Paper" and is all about, yup, you guessed it, the revision process. I've found that every teacher has their own process, or acronyms to use when revising, and just like every other person, so does Gallagher. His method is titled RADaR and stands for Replace, Add, Delete and Reorder.

When using this method for a mock lesson for one of my other classes, I've had a week (2 days really) where the students were using RADaR on their own papers, then during the second draft students would use the RADaR method on their peers papers. I think peer revision is great because sometimes it takes a second eye to see edits or revisions, but I don't think the 2nd draft assignment should have shared grades because some students may be more invested than others.

The biggest point of this chapter is distinguishing between editing and revising. I know that some kids will be intimidated seeing so much red on a paper (all of the edits), and so revising may hold so much more value. Also, revising for content is less restricting and allows for a more creative process. I know when I focus so much on spelling or grammatical errors in my own work I lose train of thought or my ideas are less developed.

This chapter for me really jumped back to the example in class of Rachael. She in a way was editing her work by removing some pieces from her project, but more importantly she was revising by distinguishing which content was more valuable to her. I think if we can get kids more focused on revising and leave the editing to the end, the content would be much more developed and profound. I really do hope that the process of revising first and editing second is something that can be worked into my primary Discourse.