Working With Writers Week 15

I edited my little sister’s term paper for her English 1010 class. I found a lot of good ideas in the reading of how to give feedback that is really going to help the writer. I edited it using the Microsoft Word editor and it really helped me organize the edits and give extensive tips for her paper. Since this is a lower level class, it was one of the first papers my sister wrote in college. There was a lot of jumbled writing and I think with the editing that I did and after talking to her and giving advice her paper turned out very well. There were a few things that I kept fixing that I learned from this class. There were several words that needed a hyphen in between the two and I loved that I could notice right of the bat.

    From the reading it explains that coaching means emphasizing the positive, listening to the writer, and asking questions rather than imposing answers. I really took this into thought as I discussed with her some of the issues in her paper. I asked her several questions instead of just stating and writing in what she did wrong. I made sure that the point she was trying to make in the paper would stay the same through our editing and would be the basis of what we fixed and changed. I also instead of just handing her paper back to her I showed her everything I fixed and explained to her some of the different ways we could make her own ideas flow better.

We decided to write the outline all over again taking ideas from the paper and organizing them so it would flow better and have good transitioning from each paragraph. I think transitioning was a huge game changer for her paper. It really made it flow and instead of chopping spreading of ideas it brought all the different ideas together and helped the paper to make a lot more sense and have structure.

    After breaking up the bigger ideas and portions of the paper we decided to look at certain sentences that I had highlighted that had some clutter. After using the thesaurus to write her paper there were unneeded larger words that really were unnecessary for the flow and simplicity of her paper. It was an argumentative essay so I explained to her that I think she should make sure she didn’t use the words “I, we, they,” as much as she did. We reworded a lot of it and it ended up coming together and making the paper even better.

    Another thing I learned from the reading is that talking with the writer for 2 minutes will save two hours later on after she finishes another draft of her paper. After she restructured it I looked at it again and I found little errors and it just had a lot better flow and her ideas made more sense after just discussing with her my opinions and the things I thought needed a little bit of change.

    I also learned that we need to get the writer talking I had her tell me her ideas and as she told me she really was able to put into words the basis of her paper and the central idea that she wanted to follow. I had her read out loud a lot of sentences in order to really hear the words that she wrote which really helps as a writer and editor to say things out loud in order to hear the things that could use some switching around. This helped me with future papers that I write and I think that if while I’m writing my own papers I should think more like an editor in order to have material that I’m satisfied with.