• The refining process consists of:

  1. Revising

  2. Editing

  3. Proofreading

• Students rearranging the order

of paragraphs or sentences to improve the text sequence.

Why Revise

• To make the draft more accessible to the reader

• To sharpen and clarify the focus and argument

• To improve and further develop ideas

Let's clear out some possible misinterpretations:

• Revising a piece of your own writing is more than just fixing errors, that's editing. Revision happens before editing.

• Revising involves re-seeing your essay from the eyes of a reader who can't read your mind, not resting satisfied until you're sure you have been as clear and as thorough as possible.

• Revising also requires you to think on a large scale, to extrapolate: If a reader remarked that you didn't have enough evidence in paragraph three, you should also take a close look at paragraphs two and four to be sure that you provide substantial evidence for those claims as well.

• Students might add, change, delete, or rearrange words to enhance meaning.

The following refining techniques will help students make

informed choices about how to improve their texts.

1. Highlighting

2. Have I Captured the Action?

3. Remove the Rubble

4. Let’s Hear It

5. Using Spellcheckers and Grammar Checkers

6. Collaboratively Created Chart

1. Ask students to read their texts again and highlight the important parts. For example, in a retell, they can mark the setting, what happened, and how it ended.

2. Have them think about what other details they could add to make the text clearer or more complete.

3. Tell them to check if the events are in the correct order: did they write them in the order they happened?

4. Talk together about how the added information made the text better.

STEPS:

• Ask students to pick a piece of writing they have already done. It should include some events where something is happening.

• Tell them to read their text and highlight the sentences where actions are described.

• Give them some time to think about whether those words clearly show what happened or how it happened.

• Encourage them to add words (like adverbs) to make the actions more specific or detailed.

• Let them make edits to their writing, and then have a short discussion about how the changes helped make the action parts clearer.

• Have students pick a text they wrote before.

• Put them in pairs. Ask them to read each other’s texts and help spot any "rubble" parts that aren’t needed or are repeated.

• Then, students work on their own to delete those unnecessary parts.

• Compare the new version with the original one.

• As a class, talk about how they chose what to remove and why.

📚 Example Class Instruction:

“Take one of your older writing pieces. Now, pair up with someone. Read each other’s texts and help find any extra or repeated parts, we call this 'rubble'.
Then, work on your own to delete those parts from your writing.
When you’re done, look at your original and new version.
Let’s talk as a group about how you knew what parts to take out and how that helped improve your writing.”

• Choose one student who has a text that needs to be defined.

• Make the text big enough so everyone can see it .

• Decide what the focus of the session will be, like checking punctuation.

• Read the text out loud and ask the class and the writer to give suggestions on how to improve it.

• The student then edits the text using the ideas given by the class.

• Make the charts with your students so they can use them later on their own.

• Ask them to come up with helpful questions they can ask themselves during revising, editing, or proofreading.

• Write those questions on a chart, and add more over time as students learn new things.

• Remind students to use the questions from the chart when they are working on their own writing.

• It’s important for students to learn about different ways to publish their work.

• Teachers should introduce publishing techniques over time through modeling, think-alouds, and giving students chances to try out different formats.

• To help students understand publishing, they should look at real examples and study things like layout, color, fonts, and images.

• By comparing different versions of the same type of text, students can create their own guidelines for publishing their writing.

Provides students with the opportunity to analyse published texts and make decisions about what is important to include when publishing texts in a book format.

Setting It Out

Gives students an opportunity to investigate a variety of publishing formats, and to compare how their layout impacts on the audience.

Design This!

Encourages students to add graphics to a piece of text and to design an appealing layout for a given audience.

Publisher’s Palette

Helps students to think about the use of colour when publishing texts. Students need to understand how the use of colour can impact on the reader.

That Catches My Eye

Is an opportunity for students to experiment with different lettering and font styles. It helps students to consider what is the most effective and suitable style to use for title pages and headings.

Screen-based Publications

Provide time for students to explore a range of screen-based

publications; this will help them to understand how different

features are used to help or hinder the readability of texts.

How Can I Publish?

Is an opportunity for students to publish the same text in a variety of formats. Students can then compare the different publications and determine which is the most effective and why.