When I saw this prompt, I felt very excited because I had just heard about a really interesting way to teach students to edit their own work. Last Tuesday, we had a guest speaker during one of my other classes. She uses a process with her students called ratiocination, which usually means “to reason with a process.” (Walker, 2015) The students basically have pens, pencils, highlighters, or a combination of all in five different colors, and each color has its own purpose.
Color 1/Step 1 is to circle each “to be” verb, count the number of those verbs and note it at the top of the first page, then divide that number by two – that is the number of to be verbs need replacing by a more active verb.
Color 2 and 3/Step 2 is used to discover sentence patterns like all short sentences or many run-on sentences. The students highlight the first sentence with one color and then use the other color to mark the next sentence. They alternate these colors with each sentence throughout the paper and then look for patterns.
Color 4/Step 3 is then done by drawing a box around the first word of each sentence to draw out too many similar beginnings like then or after that, etc.
Color 5/Step 4 marks all words that are overused and too broad like bad, stuff, good, etc., in the sentence. The students have to find synonyms for those words.
I am super excited about this process because it helps the students to review their own work and may teach them to prevent some of these errors before they make them, but it also makes for a very productive way to peer review papers due to its guiding nature. The students won’t be overwhelmed when reading others’ papers, which is usually the reason why peer review is a waste of time…
- Ellie Myron