In most of the writing I’ve had to do in the past 5 years, teachers typically dictated the topic and how the writing would be structured. APA papers about experiments and/or interventions tend to have a set format that scholars don’t want you to deviate from so I haven’t had to do much regarding this stage of the writing process.

 

The 4^th and 5^th grade students I’ve worked with usually didn’t choose their own topic, but were assigned an animal, landmark, event they were to research and write about. The teacher and I would help with the overall planning of the report and students were given a detailed layout about what they were to include in each section.

 

Drafting tends to be the most difficult part of the process for me although I believe that’s probably true for most people. Even when I know what I need to write about, transferring my thoughts to scholarly writing is like translating my thoughts into another language in print. It doesn’t help that when I’m writing, the line blurs between the drafting and revising stages so I’m practically doing both at the same time. 

 

Thankfully, students don’t usually experience my difficulties when composing their drafts. By the time they need to draft they have already done the research or created tree charts for the main ideas they want to cover so it’s more about transferring their research and supporting details into sentences that flow and make sense. 

 

As previously stated, my revising occurs at the same time as my drafting. After I have everything written, I do a final revision to make sure everything flows, has the correct tone, and the correct tense, grammar, punctuation, and meaning. I sometimes move sentences or paragraphs around or delete segments of my writing entirely because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the paper. 

 

For my students, teacher conferences are held to help students flesh out main ideas, see where they need to provide more supporting evidence, or to come up with new main ideas if something isn’t working with their overall papers. 

 

Editing is done after the final revision to correct spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. This tends to be the least time consuming of the five steps of the writing process. It helps that I don’t make many technical errors when drafting my papers and Word catches a good number of mistakes as well.

 

Students usually peer evaluate each other’s papers for grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. They’re paired based on a high ceiling-low floor method with the more advanced writers peer reviewing the less advanced writers’ papers and vice versa. This method as been effective in decreasing the amount of editing mistakes. 

 

My papers are being finalized as I go through the previous four steps of the writing process. I haven’t handwritten a paper in at least 14 years as teachers preferred to have everything typed. 

 

In 4^th and 5^th grade, students are mostly typing everything when it comes to reports and creative writing. They handwrite during the prewriting and planning stages, but everything afterwards is typed. There’s not an official publishing stage.