A Reading & Writing Course I Am About to Conduct

[Hubert]

Dear Lucy,

I am just about to conduct the course referred to in the subject line of this email at one of my city's best known educational providers. Apparently it is likely that most students in the course will be non-native speakers of English. For the purposes of the course I need to prepare a lesson on the process of editing. Do you know of any reliable resources that I could use?

Yours,

[Lucy]

Dear Hubert,

Most good books on writing should contain a chapter on editing.

I think the best way to approach editing is to take a text written by the students; tell students to re-read it first of all for ideas, content and organisation of ideas. Students can look at how paragraphs link to each other as well as the organisation within paragraphs. Then they can start working on language. I suggest you break this down; ask students to read through and check tenses and verb forms. Then to check spelling, punctuation, etc. It's important that they don't try to correct all aspects in one reading.

Students can edit their own work or their classmates' work; they can do it individually or in pairs. It is also very good if they can do this editing on a computer.

Best regards,

Lucy