​​Unlock Authentic Learning in Your Writing Workshop with this Revision Checklist Edit
In This Post
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The Revision Checklist: My Chemical Romance
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Editing, Revision & Authentic Learning
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Workshopping a Draft: “Share Time” as Authentic Learning
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Related Post: Escaping the Revision Trap
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Workshopping Hrodulf’s Doom: A Revision Checklist in Action
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Sensory Details
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Motion
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Tension
The Revision Checklist: My Chemical Romance
Over the years, my upper elementary writing workshop has featured dozens of revision checklists, and with each new iteration, I was sure I’d found the right chemistry. Ultimately, though, none of them ever amounted to more
than a series of boxes to check. They were just too abstract for my young writers to grasp. Typical checklist questions like, “Does my writing make sense?” or “Are my words interesting?” don’t offer much guidance to kids who lack experience translating directions like these into actionable steps.
Over the years, my upper elementary writing workshop has featured dozens of revision checklists, and with each new iteration, I was sure I’d found the right chemistry. Ultimately, though, none of them ever amounted to more than a series of boxes to check. They were just too abstract for my young writers to grasp. Typical checklist questions like, “Does my writing make sense?” or “Are my words interesting?” don’t offer much guidance to kids who lack experience translating directions like these into actionable steps.
It took me a while, but I finally uncovered a formula to stick with. I say “uncover” because the essential components of my early checklists - the ones that impact learning outcomes most - were buried. They only surfaced after I’d borrowed a page from Angela Stockman of Make Writing, and finally cut away all the clutter. Eventually, I realized every version was really getting at the same interrelated three elements: sensory details, motion and tension. A compelling piece of writing can’t have one without the other two. And the glue holding them together? Action verbs.
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The “these-3-things test” works for any genre: stories, poems, personal narratives, science writing, essays. I use the same checklist (the infographic above) as a first step to revising any of the writing we do.
I integrated the checklist into the “Writing Conference Request Form” I adapted from the model Melanie Meehan shares in Answers to Your Biggest Questions About Teaching Elementary Writing.
My students paste this one into the Google doc where they work on their drafts (or put their answers in margin comments), but paper would work too.
Editing, Revision & Authentic Learning
Before we dive in, a note about editing. When I Googled “revision checklist” for examples like the ones I’ve used in the past, editing checklists flooded the top results. The Google algorithms use the terms interchangeably. This is a problem because editing is about clarifying meaning - about spelling, punctuation and grammar fixes that make meaning accessible to an audience. Revision is about finding and making meaning. Revision and editing are, of course, connected, but I try to separate them in my writing workshop because when kids get hung up on spelling and verb endings, they can’t see the forest for the trees. Technology can help them with editing, but it won’t help them figure out what they want to say.
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This is why I leave editing for the very end of the writing process and/or use it as a “break” in the more challenging work of revising. When kids are stuck or their writing stamina wanes, I send them to the “squiggly underline farm” with a single weeding assignment at a time, like:
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only fix verb ending
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only work on capitalizing
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only add missing quotation marks.
I don’t want students to get really invested in hunts like these early on in a draft because they may spend time editing sections or whole pages they end up cutting.
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Real world relevance impacts student learning way more than editing for editing’s sake can. Real writers don’t waste time editing the darlings they kill in revision. The evidence is solid: engagement, context & personal connection are crucial to learning outcomes. Kids need to want to tell their stories in order to keep and flex the writing muscles they build in the process of telling them.
Workshopping a Draft: "Share Time" as Authentic Learning
Though the goal is to get kids to use a revision checklist independently, they need a lot of modeling to make it stick, so we practice together each time a student author workshops a draft. In many elementary level writing workshops called “Share Time” or “Author’s Chair,” these feedback sessions are just as important as the time devoted to writing. Not only do they build community, but they also generate some of the most insightful analysis I’ve seen my students offer in any context. As long as purpose and expectations are clear.
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Around the same time I landed on my simplified revision checklist, I stopped using the word “share time” because the term was too tainted. Most of my class thought it meant a student author shares a section of their work and classmates make comments about what they “liked” - essentially, the performative equivalent of a drill-and-kill worksheet. More often than not, our share times would end with the star author thinking, Ok, now I’m finished, when the goal was to leave them with a solid sense of next steps.
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I started to call “finished” the F-word.
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To be most effective, share time needed to involve as much authentic learning as the rest of the writing process. For the author’s chair to have real world relevance, kids would need to to learn how to give and receive concrete and usable feedback that would impact the quality of their writing.
So I did some semantic tinkering. I replaced “share time” with the term I used with my college students when I taught creative writing to undergrads: “workshopping a draft.” “Sharing” is passive and receptive; workshopping takes work. In an all-hands-on-deck sort of way. Paired with my pared-down checklist, my author’s chair adjustments eventually pointed my students toward more substantive feedback and higher quality work.
Workshopping Hrodulf's Doom
Let’s look at a student example to see how these revisionary tweaks changed my writing workshop. Here’s an early draft of the opening page of Hrodulf’s Doom: Issue 1, Alexander Meets Himself by a group of third-grade writers:
Note: My students’ first drafts are, of course, not free of spelling and grammar errors, but I clean them up in the examples here so they won’t distract from the topic at hand.
Sensory Details
The 3 Keys infographic steered our discussion as we workshopped this draft with the class. I started by asking about sensory details. There was some back and forth about the adjective “weird,” and they ultimately agreed it was a “telling” word because weird can look a lot of different ways. There’s nothing specific to picture here, except for the tentacles - the beginning glimmer of a sensory detail. Same thing with “dirty” and “lots of trash.” No details to visualize.
When we workshop a draft, I project student work on the screen and jot down notes with classmates’ feedback in margin comments, like this one.
Motion
When I steered the discussion to item 2 on the revision checklist - motion - lots of kids mentioned movement they assumed a description like this would involve but disagreed about whether or not anything was moving right now in the passage as written. So I asked them to identify the verbs. As is typical of a first draft, no action verbs here. Just a was and two hads.
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For years, “show-don’t-tell” was my writing workshop mantra, but this set of instructions didn’t always click with every learner. When I amended them to “show-don’t-tell with action verbs,” I got results. Here’s one student’s suggestion:
Tension
For checklist item 3 - tension - I rephrased the term in several ways: conflict, back-and-forth, push-and-pull, opposites. When I asked for observations about how or where this stuff surfaced in the draft, many suggested there was conflict around the trash because who wants to live in a place covered in garbage? When I pressed them to identify the exact spot in the writing where this is clear, they couldn’t, and soon enough flooded the discussion with potential tension. Here’s one suggestion:
Like the path to sensory details and the road to motion, the trail to tension is paved in action verbs. Now let’s look at how these authors used their classmates’ feedback to inform their revision. Here are the panels of the published comic where the final draft of this section appears (the opening two pages).
Since my students ultimately publish their work as comics, graphic poems and/or graphic mini-novels, their revised descriptions don’t always make it into the final version, because sometimes they “translate” an image that began as words into an illustration (in this case, digital collages). Nonetheless, it’s still crucial, in a real-world way, that they write descriptions with as much precision and specificity as possible because they serve as valuable guides to the illustrating process.
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The verbs that drive their opening image set the scene for the entire saga. Instead of “a weird sun that had tentacles,” now we get one that “blocks out moonlight,” which raises a question that hooks us: How are the sun and moon in this place both visible at the same time?
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On page 2, we see exactly what kind of garbage has piled up on this world. (Sounds a lot like the trash we have here on earth!) We also see and hear how this trash moves: instead of just “being” there, now it flattens and crushes. The illustrations make the conflict crystal clear, but I don’t think the collages would have been as successful without the revised descriptions there as a roadmap.