This is actually two lesson plans, one about editing politely, the other about levels of edit. The levels-of-edit lesson is good if the class is small, if your students are at the graduate level, or if they are professional technical writers.

In a large unruly class of undergraduate engineers, you might have trouble getting the points across unless you point out that editing prevents them from looking like idiots in print.

Lesson plan, editing politely

Grammar Girl introduces herself

Major concept

A good editor looks not only at the technical or grammatical aspect of a written piece but at the human aspects—how the writer will react to an edit.

There are two sides, though—the editor has to learn to be tough without being mean, and the writer has to learn to listen closely and set ego aside.

Generalizations

Nothing is lost by being polite. In fact, if the editor comments about the good things in a piece, no matter what its problems, these comments help the writer to write better because they point him or her in the right direction.

Objectives

Cognitive

Students will learn helpful and informative methods for criticizing work. They will also learn how to receive or manage an edit well.

Students will begin to trust each other's editing.

Grammar Cops article from the New York Times. You may need to sign up for a free subscription.

Procedures

1. Ask the students to read Grammar Cops.
2. When finished, ask if the "grammar cops" were editing politely.

Write the answers on the board:

1. What was your worst experience editing someone else’s material?
2. What was your worst experience being edited?
3. What do you do if you think the editor has made a mistake? (The editor can make mistakes too.)
4. Have you ever not edited someone's piece because you thought it would cause too much trouble?
5. Have you ever questioned an editor or reader about his or her reaction?
6. How would you define “editing politely”? How about "being edited politely"?

Some answers:

Worst editing experience: Defensiveness—didn't listen; material too confusing or out of your range; possibility of an argument = discomfort; difficulty explaining what's wrong; too many errors; too late in the process; didn't get it (not defensive but didn't listen).

Worst experience being edited: Silence; too much work to do based on the edit; embarrassment (for good or bad reasons); felt I was being attacked.

Lecture: Repeat or extend the discussion by including these suggestions:

• commenting on the good aspects of the piece
• being specific in the comments
• questioning everything that they don't understand
• meeting with the writer instead of just marking the draft
• being there from the beginning—asking someone to rewrite a 25-page paper is not a pleasant experience
• doing multiple edits, concentrating on one aspect of the edit at a time
• use good handwriting for your notes on the manuscript or use the commenting features of Word

From the writer's side, they can also remember to:

• Question the editor or reader for specifics.
• Repeat back to the editor the comment or criticism so that you both know that you understand the comment.
• Try to imagine how a criticism that seems off the wall could be true. People don't lie when they criticize, so try to imagine how this criticism could be true. From what worldview did this criticism come?

Reinforcement and assessment

Reinforcement

Have the students edit each other's work. Ask them to do specific things:

1. Comment on what you liked.
2. Is this approach narrow enough?
3. Did the writer follow the assignment?
4. Mark areas where you have questions about the material.
5. Note where you'd prefer to talk to the writer rather than write comments.

Assessment

At the end of the lesson or at the beginning of the next lesson, ask each student for his or her reaction to the lesson (students can pass). "What did you discover about editing?"

At a few points during the course, ask students to hand in the edited copies of their drafts as well as the finished papers. The students must sign the papers they edit and will be graded for their edits as well as their own papers.

Lesson plan, levels of edit

Because no one has unlimited time or money, organizations and individuals need to know how to best use their time when editing.

Generalizations

In the same way that writing and editing are separate processes, editing itself can be divided into at least nine processes (ten if you include proofreading).

Objectives

Cognitive

Students will see how many types of editing are possible and what goes into a well-edited piece.

1. Students will consciously start to separate various aspects of editing.
2. Students will start to schedule their editing time appropriately when working on their own or other people's materials.

Levels of Edit handout

Jigsaw one or more articles about the levels of edit from Technical Communication:

• Hays, Robert. 2003. “A Rapid ‘Debugging’ Technique.” Technical communication 50, no. 4:452-457.
• Corbin, Michelle; Moell, Pat; Boyd, Mike.2002. “Technical editing as quality assurance: adding value to content.” Technical communication 49, no.3:286-300.
• Nadziejka, David. 1995. “Needed: A revision of the lowest level of editing.” Technical communication 42, no. 3:278–283.

Note: "Jigsawing" is a very effective method for getting the jist of a long article read out in class. You hand out the article you want the students to read, and then assign a chunk of the article to each student (figure out the breaks ahead of time). Each student reads his or her chunk, and then reports in one or two minutes what he or she gleaned from that chunk. By the end of the reports, everyone has a good idea what the article was about. Depending on the length of the article, this takes 30 to 60 minutes.

Procedures

Lecture

Hand out the Levels of Edit table and give the students a few minutes to read or skim it. Explain that "Levels of Edit” is a historically groundbreaking method, developed by Robert Van Buren and Mary Fran Buehler, senior technical editors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), for deciding on how hard to work.

• There are five levels, which range from cursory to detailed and substantive.
• The levels are organized from easiest to hardest.
• Each level is added to the next.
• It can be used as a management tool in two ways:
  1. It lets you manage client expectations: You can whip out your Levels of Edit chart and say, “Sorry, folks, but you’re only giving me a day to do this, so I can only do this much work.” If the client says, “Hey, this isn’t rocket science!” you can say, “Well, as a matter of fact, it is.”
  2. It lets you organize your own time (or department’s time). If the material is very important, you know you have to go to the bottom level. But if time is short, you know you have to allocate most of the effort, somehow, to the last level.

The levels work very well to break the process up into manageable chunks and to ensure that an article going out from an organization is not embarrassing to that organization. However, there are some problems with the list.

Discussion

Problem #1:

Note that proofreading is not listed on the table. Proofreaders used to check that nothing changed after a manuscript left the editor’s hand. They would work from the typesetter’s proof. The reason was that, whenever you had someone keyboarding (typing in) the text again, you could expect typos.

However, with the advent of electronic publishing, you might have the same file coming from the author, being changed by the editor, and going into print without being retyped.

Ask: So why proofread?

Possible answers:

• People don't use their spellcheckers.
• Spellcheckers don't catch the wrong word, only the badly spelled word.
• Something may have been erased.

Problem #2:

Ask: What else is missing?

Answers:

• Fact checking and verification.
• Usability testing.
• Technical content. In particular, what is the lowest level we should go to in terms of technical content and quality? Also, authors' needs and funding organizations' needs, not just the editor's needs.

Procedure

1. If there is time and interest, jigsaw one of the articles listed in the handouts.
2. Open discussion on the topics in the article (and also on the jigsaw idea).

Reinforcement and assessment

In this session and/or later sessions, students will be editing each other's drafts. The teacher must remind them to concentrate on content, but to also check the manuscript against the other levels.

At a few points during the course, ask students to hand in the edited copies of their drafts as well as the finished papers. The students must sign the papers they edit and will be graded for their edits as well as their own papers.

Student 1: In class five I learned about editing the message. I never use to edit any of my essays, letters or messages. Because of this every time points were deducted from my paper. Finally I realized how important it is to edit, once you are done writing. Once I began to edit the result was reflected in my papers.

Student 2: From this homework assignment, I learned how to finalize messages by editing for factual content mistakes, mechanical errors, and using proofreading methods. When editing for factual content, check for purpose, include any missing information and left-out words, check all facts, and make sure supporting information logically follows the topic. Never before have I implemented this editing style, usually just correcting grammatical errors (proofreading) and fixing sentence fragments (editing for mechanical errors). Now by using all three of these styles I can see a major difference in my writing skills and have take away much writer’s block that occurs from lack of editing after writing rather than editing during the writing stage.

Student 3: In this class, I learned how to edit other people’s writing errors. Often, people end up writing papers that have grammatical or syntactical errors. And most of the time, they are unwilling to accept their mistakes and correct it. Therefore, when we have to correct such mistakes, then we should do so in a polite manner without offending them. Instead of saying that “You are wrong”, we could rephrase it and say that “The way you approached the paper is correct but it could have been better if you could approach this way”. This is less offending and more acceptable. Furthermore, while editing a paper for errors, one should keep in mind that the mistakes must be edited in such a manner so that it does not distort the meaning it is actually trying to convey.