Revision Decisions

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, 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 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 of them in one place--the prepositions, relative pronouns, and conjunctions, both subordinating and coordinating. This 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 make: delete, rearrange, add, form, and talk it out. (Chapter two is a five-day plan that introduces DRAFT.) Finally, the tips.The tips, sprinkled generously throughout the book, are treasures. The tips clarify points of common confusion, give precise language to cement concept for teachers, provide cautions, and dive deeper into a grammar-geek topics. Part way through the book I found myself flipping ahead through 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.

Really interesting book. Super useful in my class that focuses on English in education.

I fell in love with this book over the summer. Teaching writing can be a struggle to sixth grade students. This book has a great approach to how to incorperate the writing process into daily instruction. As a writer, you always need to look over your work and revise. I have read many of Jeff Anderson's books, this one was a great addition to my collection.

As always, Jeff Anderson puts his magic touch on the difficult lessons to teach and encouraging the "talk" phase of revision. His pragmatic, yet creative, way of helping teachers zero in on style specifics provides down-to-earth assistance. Jeff and his co-author, Deborah Dean, did a masterful job!

Another great Jeff Anderson book giving practical tips for bringing the teaching of writing to life in the classroom. Anderson reminds us that beautiful and effective writing is tightly constructed and there are some very specific ways we can help our students to achieve this.

Jeff Anderson writes a wonderful book on teaching students how to revise their writing, a lifelong skill.

Always great activities in Jeff Anderson books. Easily accessible for student writers of all learning levels.

Jeff Anderson was ahead of his time with his thoughts on teaching grammar in context :) I would recommend purchasing all 3 of his books which will help you develop a plan for instruction.