Ratrocination And Revision

I have crossed paths with Joyce Carroll several times. I attended her workshop on this subject twenty years ago. It made a lasting impression on how editing and revising should be done. I must admit that I have never followed it exactly. When she presented it all those years ago, she advocated using different colors of markers. Each student would have to have several different colors. I had classes of thirty. I was young and poor and I had one baby and another on the way. My school gave me a roll of tape and a stapler at the beginning of the year. That was the extent of my supplies. What I took from her workshop was that editing should be in the hands of the students. We're decades past marking up the students' papers in red and handing them back. We know that the students never looked at them anyway, and the teacher just missed a good night's sleep for nothing. This is a strategy that students can learn from. Don't we want them to look at their own papers critically ? By giving them the "clues", we are putting tools in their hands to improve their own writing. This is done before the paper is handed in, so it is actually a coaching tool. I could see a lot of individual coaching going on during the decoding process. The symbols are a more practical alternative to the color coding, and if used consistantly, could be internalized by the student after a few months.