Having Fun with Revision-RADAR

During the workshop, participants were given the opportunity to revise with RADAR. Jeff Anderson and Kelly Gallagher have done some work with revision.  Kelly Gallagher speaks about this in his book called Write Like This from Stenhouse Publishers (2011).  Here is an example of the process.  There will be more information with pictures coming up on the blog later this week. I just wanted to put something up for now.  This is my writing using RADAR. I took it all the way through but I will upload other examples from step 1 to coding.  Writers of all ages can benefit from this.  I know I have.  Teachers and students rave about it!

We chose a truism from our morning experience starting with  the sentence frame-I have learned that sometimes....we share each others truisms and couldn't help but share the memories that go with them.

Then we chose a memory from the quickist in which to write that goes with the truism or theme.  We then sketched out the memory.

We wrote for about 3 minutes in a quickwrite about that memory. Then I explained the RADAR process.  When we write we revise.  What do we do when we revise?  Sometimes we replace words or phrases that aren't what we want them to be. Other times we replace words that are repeated with better words.  Sometimes we add sentence or phrases to make our writing clearer to the reader.  Still other times we delete words we repeat or that aren't to our liking.  Finally, you will see that we reorganize our sentences or paragraphs or even the order of the sentence to make it flow better.  We want to make our writing better.  We move from okay to better to best. We read like a writer and write with the reader in mind.  I went through the whole process of, as Kelly Gallagher likes to say, "The I do, you do model." I model it with my writing and you try it with yours. Each time we go through and replace, add, delete or reorganize, I use a different color so you can track the movement of my mind.  Then we code it to what process we actually utilized. Wow! That is some thinking.  It's fun to revise.  Remember, anyone can write, but real writers revise!