Teach Your Students to Find their Inner Editors

 

With the rapid increase in minimally edited ebooks, teachers have a golden opportunity to teach real-time editing skills to their students. The world is rapidly filling up with ebooks - some great, some less than that, and many that are in sore need of an editor.

The next time you are previewing an ebook (or any book for that matter) for use with your class - instead of being put off by grammatical, usage or formatting errors - which can be rampant in today's glut of ebooks - turn this into a great hands-on, real life teaching and learning opportunity for you and your students. Have your students become the editors - ferreting out errors and discussing solutions for them.

Red Pen image by JJR

 Take for example a book where you notice many instances of possessive versus plural misuse. The rules for plurals are fairly simple:

1. The plural form of a noun indicates that there is more than one person, place or thing being referred to.
2. Generally, plurals are formed by added -s or -es to the word as in cat, cats; girl, girls; box, boxes.
3. Some words that end with a -y form their plural by changing the -y to -i and adding -es as in lady, ladies; city, cities; baby, babies.
4. There are also some irregular forms and exceptions that you can look up.
   

In contrast - possessive form indicates that the noun owns "something" and the apostrophe is used to for possessives:

1. Add -'s to the singular form of the word (even if it ends in -s) as in boy's hat; cat's food; book's pages.
2. Add -'s to the plural forms that do not end in -s as in children's books; men's hats.
3. Add just an apostrophe to the end of plural nouns that end in -s as in three dogs' bones; five boys' boots; several elephants' trunks.
4. Again, there are some additional apostrophe rules that you can look up.
   

One of the more common editing errors that students may find is the confusion as to when to use plural form, and when to use an apostrophe. To help make it clear, I usually tell my students to think of the apostrophe as a leash - joining the noun with that it owns. Here's an example:
The girl has a new blue dress. She owns the dress, so the correct form is:

The girl's new dress is blue. You use the possessive form here because the girl owns the dress.

Girl's is NOT plural - yet many times you will see this:

Three girl's went shopping. This is incorrect since girl's indicates one girl who owns something. In this sentence, the plural form is needed - not the possessive.

Using this example, if you find a book that contains many errors like this - set your students free to note where these types of errors occur, and how to correct them. Try to limit the 'hunt" for just one or two types of errors at a time to focus the lessons tightly.

Once students have had a chance to read and note corrections, hold a class meeting to review and discuss the possible changes.
This type of lesson will work with many different proofreading and editing topics. Think of what you have been teaching and set students loose to find examples that will supplement their instruction. Perhaps you have been studying punctuation in dialog, or correct capitalization, or confusing word usage. All of these are great topics to use for a lesson such as this. Ebooks seem to work best, as often they are only lightly edited, if at all, thus providing many examples for students to find.

This activity can also be used for practice in pure editing rather than in proofing text. Challenge students to find and rework passages with an emphasis on using more colorful language or to make generic passages clearer. Of course, students should never actually alter any of the author's work - time for a lesson on copyright and plagiarism - but creating their own phrases and descriptions from a given passage is good practice.

Don't let a poorly edited, but otherwise excellent story put you off. Show students that even "real" writers need editors, and set them on the path to releasing their own inner editors as they read.

References and Resources:

• Purdue Online Writing Lab
• Grammar Topics
• How to Use Proper Punctuation When Writing Dialog
• An example: Skye Rising: The Spirit Agreement
  

Copyright 2013 Irene Taylor.  Permission to republish in print or online must be granted by the author of this blog in writing.