March 15

Mar 15/16 Review Steps for Rewriting end of The Outsiders

So you’ve been writing up a storm! The end of the novel we read wasn’t satisfying enough to you, so you are rewriting the ending! Good for you!

As you’re winding up, here are a few review steps for you to follow to put a real polish to your work!

  1. Go through your Google doc and add a Comment to identify when each of the following steps occurs:
    1. any other rising action steps
    2. beginning of the climax action
    3. beginning of falling action
    4. beginning of your resolution
  2. Review the length of your writing. You picked up after “the rumble” and before the “climax, but you shouldn’t have too much more written leading up to your climax; the climax should come fairly soon in your writing. You also want to consider how long or short your climax development is, the falling action and resolution.
    Ask yourself if things are well-paced or evenly spread out in your writing? Or do some things take a long time to happen while others are short and choppy?
  3. Peer Edits – Finding the Errors by Ear
    You can look over your writing 10 times and still not find errors that are right there, because you’re so involved with your own work; you’ll miss seeing them. That’s where a peer editor comes in. Pick a partner or friend who will read your story out loud and record it for you. Then, while you listen to them reading it, listen for the pauses or moments of confusion in their voice when what’s written slows them down from smoothly reading and understanding. Those will be the places where you’ll have to review your work again for corrections.
  4. Formatting features to review/correct:
    1. Any spoken dialogue (other than Ponyboy’s internal narration) needs to use quotation marks.
      1. Make sure there’s a beginning and end quotation mark for each time you’ve used them.
      2. Make sure there’s no space between the quotation mark and beginning of the spoken phrase.
      3. Make sure if the dialogue addresses someone, it uses a comma to separate their name from the part communicated. (see red comma)
        Make sure you use a comma in the spoken dialogue if the whole sentence doesn’t end there. (see blue comma)
        Ex: “Darry, you’ll never make it,” I cried out as he headed down the road.
    2. Capital letters
      1. Check that each beginning of a sentence includes a capital letter.
      2. All names and names of places need capitals as well.
    3. Check that, if you used indentations, you used them consistently for your whole piece of writing.
    4. Possessive S corrections. If there is ownership of something, an object or emotions, it requires an ‘s.
      Ponyboy’s brother, Dally’s rage, Johnny’s injuries, Darry’s mood.
  5. Running Edits through Grammarly/Hemmingway
    1. Copy your writing text into a new Grammarly document and let it scan for errors. Download the PDF from Grammarly and upload it to your AR Assess and Reflect Page in your Blog as another example of corrections identified in your writing. You can label it “March/2016 Grammarly Edit Suggestions of my Writing”.
    2. Use Grammarly to decide on the suggested edits – accept them or not. When finished, copy your edited work and paste it into your Google doc BELOW your first, original draft. Be sure to identify this as edited work.
    3. There’s another program you can run your work through for edits. It’s only downloaded on the back/corner pc for now. It helps identify passive voice and difficult/very difficult sentences that need to be corrected or broken up.
Category: ELA 9 | LEAVE A COMMENT