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Revision Decisions: Talking Through Sentences and Beyond
Revision is often a confusing and difficult process for students, but it’s also the most important part of the writing process. If students leave our classrooms not knowing how to move a piece of writing forward, we’ve failed them. Revision Decisions will help teachers develop the skills students need in an ever-evolving writing, language, and reading world. Jeff Anderson and Deborah Dean have written a book that engages writers in the tinkering, playing, and thinking that are essential to clarify and elevate writing.
Focusing on sentences, Jeff and Deborah use mentor texts to show the myriad possibilities that exist for revision. Essential to their process is the concept of classroom talk. Readers will be shown how revision lessons can be discussed in a generative way, and how each student can benefit from talking through the revision process as a group. Revision Decisions focuses on developing both the writing and the writer. The easy-to-follow lessons make clear and accessible the rigorous thinking and the challenging process of making writing work. Narratives, setup lessons, templates, and details about how to move students toward independence round out this essential book. Additionally, the authors weave the language, reading, and writing goals of the Common Core and other standards into an integrated and connected practice.
The noted language arts teacher James Britton once said that good writing “floats on a sea of talk.” Revision Decisions supports those genuine conversations we naturally have as readers and writers, leading the way to the essential goal of making meaning.
Focusing on sentences, Jeff and Deborah use mentor texts to show the myriad possibilities that exist for revision. Essential to their process is the concept of classroom talk. Readers will be shown how revision lessons can be discussed in a generative way, and how each student can benefit from talking through the revision process as a group. Revision Decisions focuses on developing both the writing and the writer. The easy-to-follow lessons make clear and accessible the rigorous thinking and the challenging process of making writing work. Narratives, setup lessons, templates, and details about how to move students toward independence round out this essential book. Additionally, the authors weave the language, reading, and writing goals of the Common Core and other standards into an integrated and connected practice.
The noted language arts teacher James Britton once said that good writing “floats on a sea of talk.” Revision Decisions supports those genuine conversations we naturally have as readers and writers, leading the way to the essential goal of making meaning.
298 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 31, 2014
About the author
Jeff Anderson
200 books62 followersLibrarians note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 2, 2014
I love how Jeff's thinking continues to evolve. He builds on the work of Mechanically Inclined and Everyday Edits this time out by group work on sentence combining. Like his previous attempts, this book is grounded in student work and is just as specific and thoughtful. Buy it.
January 4, 2017
I love the concept of sentence play that reverberates throughout this book. Even though it was both Jeff Andeson and Debbie Dean who wrote the book, I thought it was interesting to see their two voices come together. Having taken classes from Debbie and working with her on my research thesis, I knew when her voice arose and when the passages from picture books were employed. It was fun to observe.
I found the DRAFT strategies in this book useful as I see young writers struggle. One small item resonated with me, and one that may easily be glanced over. In one instance when Debbie encouraged her class to share their ideas about a sentence revision, she says, "What's the difference, writers?" (Anderson & Dean, p.118). Having just read the majority of a text that shared allowed students to become writers, that is, to think and act like authentic writers, she identified them as such. As we spent so much time reading about the effect that each sentence have, I give pause to reflect on what it might mean to have someone so achieved in the writing world identify me as a writer. It's small, but it makes a world of difference when discovering your identity.
Further, I loved how Debbie and Jeff encouraged students to write "beyond correctness" (Gallagher, 2015), observing the effect that various sentences structures have on the overall meaning. Anderson and Dean truly help writers see that there is not one correct way to write, but, rather, that copious options exist, and sentence play breeds creativity.
So, on the start of NCTE '16, I finished what I started when I purchased this book at NCTE '14.
I found the DRAFT strategies in this book useful as I see young writers struggle. One small item resonated with me, and one that may easily be glanced over. In one instance when Debbie encouraged her class to share their ideas about a sentence revision, she says, "What's the difference, writers?" (Anderson & Dean, p.118). Having just read the majority of a text that shared allowed students to become writers, that is, to think and act like authentic writers, she identified them as such. As we spent so much time reading about the effect that each sentence have, I give pause to reflect on what it might mean to have someone so achieved in the writing world identify me as a writer. It's small, but it makes a world of difference when discovering your identity.
Further, I loved how Debbie and Jeff encouraged students to write "beyond correctness" (Gallagher, 2015), observing the effect that various sentences structures have on the overall meaning. Anderson and Dean truly help writers see that there is not one correct way to write, but, rather, that copious options exist, and sentence play breeds creativity.
So, on the start of NCTE '16, I finished what I started when I purchased this book at NCTE '14.
July 4, 2015
I'd recommend it to any 4-12 grade teacher. A easy to remember acronym and lots and lots of great lessons to support leading your students to better revisions.
April 3, 2018
Great book on sentence combining.
January 13, 2019
This is a smart and use-able book that, importantly, provides excellent ideas for how you might encourage young writers to revise by looking at contextual examples. Equally important, it never suggests activities that have "correct" answers, emphasizing that different ways of conveying the same idea operate toward different ends. One is never more correct than another. I also liked that the authors' approach to revision allowed plenty of opportunities to talk about and teach grammar in the context of reading and writing, which many studies have shown is the only way for these lessons to "stick." So -- why 4 stars? Only because I'm not sure how many of the exercises/activities might migrate into a secondary or higher education environment. To be clear, this isn't the authors' intention. It's mine.
July 26, 2017
Awesome book! I'm sad to say that after 15 years of teaching, I feel like I've been "doing it wrong." This way of teaching grammar completely makes sense to me. Now, the question is, where to begin?
June 22, 2015
For the past 10 years, I've been learning and working with students on elaborating using sentence construction. Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined (2005) and Everyday Editing (2007) got me started with mentor sentences, and because of his work I started collecting particularly well-written sentences, which we analyze in Sentence-of-the-Week. For several years, immediately preceding Revision Decisions, I added the ideas from Henry Noden's Image Grammar to our study. In Revision Decisions, Jeff Anderson and Deborah Dean reference Noden quite a bit, but put the work in a more elementary context...exactly what I've been trying to do on my own. So it's the right text at the right time for me, and I can barely stand to put it down.
Revision Decisions takes the key elements of sentence construction and arranges them into ten lessons sets, each following a process of establishing context, engaging in practice, and collaborating to imitate. It's a scaffold ready for classroom use, including deconstructed sentences, which can be copied from the appendices or downloaded and printed from the Stenhouse website.
A couple of other elements from Revision Decisions that I'll be putting to immediate use include: Appendix F, G, and the Tips. Appendix F is "Charting Connections," which has all connectors in one place--the prepositions, relative pronouns, and conjunctions, both subordinating and coordinating. This appendix will be a great resource for students in their writer's toolbox. Appendix G uses the acronym DRAFT as a handy reminder of the revision decisions students could make: Delete, rearrange, add, form, and talk it out. (Chapter two is a five-day plan that introduces DRAFT.) I see this as an anchor chart. Finally, the tips.
Sprinkled generously throughout the book, the tip are treasures. The tips clarify points of common confusion, give precise language to cement concepts for teachers, provide cautions, and dive deeper into a grammar-geek topics. Part way through the book I found myself flipping ahead through dozens of pages, scanning for the little grey boxes. A great deal of my initial annotation, a sure sign of my learning, is clustered around the tip boxes.
Revision Decisions is a rich resource for teachers looking for ways to help students become better writers and communicators.
Revision Decisions takes the key elements of sentence construction and arranges them into ten lessons sets, each following a process of establishing context, engaging in practice, and collaborating to imitate. It's a scaffold ready for classroom use, including deconstructed sentences, which can be copied from the appendices or downloaded and printed from the Stenhouse website.
A couple of other elements from Revision Decisions that I'll be putting to immediate use include: Appendix F, G, and the Tips. Appendix F is "Charting Connections," which has all connectors in one place--the prepositions, relative pronouns, and conjunctions, both subordinating and coordinating. This appendix will be a great resource for students in their writer's toolbox. Appendix G uses the acronym DRAFT as a handy reminder of the revision decisions students could make: Delete, rearrange, add, form, and talk it out. (Chapter two is a five-day plan that introduces DRAFT.) I see this as an anchor chart. Finally, the tips.
Sprinkled generously throughout the book, the tip are treasures. The tips clarify points of common confusion, give precise language to cement concepts for teachers, provide cautions, and dive deeper into a grammar-geek topics. Part way through the book I found myself flipping ahead through dozens of pages, scanning for the little grey boxes. A great deal of my initial annotation, a sure sign of my learning, is clustered around the tip boxes.
Revision Decisions is a rich resource for teachers looking for ways to help students become better writers and communicators.
December 19, 2015
This book was disappointing. The first section was useful, but once it got into Part 2, The Lesson Sets, I found the book repetitive. There was only one method used to teach revision: sentence clusters. While I love this idea, the book could have offered many other methods. The Lesson Sets basically went over grammatical terms (I think students should be able to use a variety of structures, but I don't care if they can identify gerunds versus participial phrases) and gave sample clusters.
January 4, 2015
Great suggestions for teaching revision and editing. I will definitely be applying them in my own classroom (after a few tweaks for younger writers).
August 9, 2015
Concrete ways to teach students to revise.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews