And then we write and then we revise and what I find in working with young people is nobody wants to revise but I find that working with middle aged people to. I don’t want to revise. It’s annoying, you know? So then we go into editing, that you have to actually have – and I’m kind of a stickler for this, that you actually have to have correct grammar and correct punctuation and it’s —
I think for a first draft it’s great to sort of do best guess writing, you know? But I think in the end, if you want to be writing, then you’re a professional and you have to adhere to the standards, so we go back and we edit both for content in terms of what’s clear and what isn’t clear, what makes sense and doesn’t make sense, what needs more development and what doesn’t.
And we edit for actual English language diction, for what makes sense. And then they have to do it again and sometimes they even have to do it a third time to understand that writing gets better as you spend more time with it. It doesn’t get worse. It gets better. And so teaching children the patience to sort of produce a first draft and get to the end and then once you’ve done that you kind of know what you have, that there’s a lot of joy in re—writing.
There’s a lot of pleasure in it. It’s not just like oh, the teacher made me do that but that’s when you turn it into something that’s polished. So part of the teaching is not just what makes sense as writing but what the standards are, what the professional standards are because when you turn in something, whether you’re turning it in to your teacher or to your school newspaper or to a contest or to your publisher, you’re saying this is my best work and that’s a hard thing for all of us to learn, especially for kids.
You can say well there I did it, you know? When my sons were growing up, they always had to write a paragraph. That was sort of the unit of commerce, write a paragraph about and every one of my sons and this I thought was maybe typical of them would say can one sentence be a paragraph. I would say yeah, it can be, but is it your best work, you know, and they said well who cares, we just have to write a paragraph.
So I think getting kids beyond that, beyond what the assignment is into being invested in it, that this is a little PCU that you’re putting out in the world and that you want it to represent the best of you is – I mean if you can teach that, then you’re really teaching writing. It’s hard because kids don’t want to do it but I think that the pride that they feel from going over something once or twice or three times and then having something that can go up on the bulletin board like my poem did or can be sent home or can be put in a magazine that your class publishes, I think that those – the pride in that moment lasts forever.
I’m a living example of that. You know, my poem in the first grade was put up on the bulletin board and here it is 50 years later and I’m still writing and loving it because I keep hoping it’ll get up on another bulletin board somewhere.