Book Review: Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop
By: Heather Hummel
Date: October 2, 2008
Summary: Heather Hummel reviews Jeff Anderson's Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop, which transforms the study of grammar into a way to empower students.
Everyday Editing: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop. 2007. Stenhouse Publishers. 164 pages. $18.50
What puts students to sleep more quickly than a grammar lesson? The search for effective grammar pedagogy is like the quest for the Holy Grail. We are always looking for ways to get students to magically learn and use proper grammar.
Teachers throw up their hands and sigh over this problem: students just nod off in their chairs. Everyday Editing by Jeff Anderson is a compact but innovative approach to integrating editing skills into the classroom.
Anderson's focus is geared toward teachers in middle school, but he offers techniques that could be applicable to any grade level. He proposes that teachers will have more success—and more engaged, enthusiastic students—if the students are "invited" into the editing process. Editing, for Jeff Anderson, is not a separate and discrete activity; he integrates ways of studying and thinking about editing into the classroom conversation every day, all year long.
The philosophy behind his style will resonate with most teachers: "Teach deeply and kids will know deeply" (14). Moreover, Anderson strives for authentic learning practices, and ways for students to ask questions and find their own answers in the quest for good writing. He acknowledges the failure of traditional methods of teacher response; a marked-up essay is not only unsuccessful in getting students to learn and use correct grammar, but it can also erode student confidence and trust.
Making Grammar an Active Event
Anderson lays out a game plan for an alternative approach: inviting students to notice, imitate, celebrate, write, revise, and edit. He relies on "model mentor texts," or stellar examples of sentences, to illustrate each grammar point. He also asks questions like "How'd they do it?" to "uncover how writers communicate with readers" (44).
The book is structured in a user-friendly format: after briefly discussing approaches to grammar, he gives a broad overview of what editing invitations look like in his classroom and then dedicates a significant portion of the book to example lesson plans using the invitation methodology. He demonstrates with ten standard lesson topics including compound sentences; the use of commas, colons, and apostrophes; parallel sentence structures; paragraphs; and dialogues.
Teach deeply and kids will know deeply.
A few specifics will give you a taste of his style: in a chapter on capitalization, Anderson says,
Simply introducing a list of seventeen capitalization rules does nothing to develop my students' power of deduction, nor does it engage them in making sense of what capitalization shows. This activity, based on one found in Acts of Teaching (Carroll and Wilson 1993), creates an opportunity to discover the rules within the context of their reading. Since they are engaged in searching, collecting, and collaborating with others to see the patterns, the likelihood that this lesson will stick is great. (73)
Anderson's strength is that he makes grammar exercises into active events: the students get to sleuth out examples, discover reasons, and explore patterns of meaning. The activities are designed to pull the students in and keep them engaged in a variety of ways.
In a chapter on verb choice, he includes helpful tools in the sidebars that give suggestions for how to code passive voice or how to uncover what a writer is doing to communicate with readers. He makes his teaching as transparent as possible by showing the questions he asks to nudge students in the right direction, and describing how he handles it if they don't follow.
For example, after giving students time to work with a partner and strengthen a sentence, he explains, "We discuss how we changed it. We read it both ways, comparing and contrasting, naming which is weaker and stronger and why." Then he asks his students, "'Do you see a pattern of when it's easy to strengthen a sentence by choosing the right form of a verb?' If no one does, I show them" (99).
Putting the Power in Students' Hands
Perhaps the most cogent reminder in the book is for teachers to celebrate the successes when students practice new grammar skills and produce good work. He posts examples of their work on the walls of his classroom to remind students that they are the real thing—they are writers. He says, "This real audience, this real celebration, gets kids writing and experimenting with editing conventions and it keeps them doing so—in a way that teachers marking up papers all Sunday night never will. Kids will do what we celebrate" (32).
His claim reminds us that we often work hard for our students, hoping that enough repetition and reminders will somehow finally drill it home. This book confirms that a new approach, one that is less forceful and relies upon encouragement and inquiry instead of rules and repetition, might do the trick.
By discussing editing in more of a social exchange, kids see they have power, that perhaps it is possible for them to do this writing stuff.
In his conclusion Anderson asks, "Isn't it a worthy goal to create a world where people aren't afraid of grammar or editing?" (158). Even the most enthusiastic writers find grammar discussions tedious and, often, intimidating. This is exactly why Everyday Editing is a gem: Anderson succeeds in making grammar lively and unintimidating, and he offers an approach that allows students to be inquisitive, play with sentence structures, and practice creating effective pieces of writing.
Anderson posits, "By discussing editing in more of a social exchange, kids see they have power, that perhaps it is possible for them to do this writing stuff" (21).
"Power" is a key theme implicit throughout Everyday Editing—whether it is using rich text examples from the student's world, humor, or developed, thoughtful activities, Anderson gives the students ownership. From the glimpses he gives into his classroom discussions, it seems that he puts the power straight into his students' hands—and they not only know it, but run with it.