On Wednesdays this fall, I’m
sharing the process of creating my recently-published book Ick! Delightfully
Disgusting Animals Dinners, Dwellings, and Defenses step-by-step. (To learn about the whole process in one sitting or to share an age-appropriate version with your students, check out this new resource on my website.)
drafting process by sharing a technique for making writing personal and unique.
You can scroll down and read that post. Today, I’ll begin a
description of the revision process.
I like to think of revision as sort of like
remodeling a house. The rough draft is okay. It has doors and windows and a roof.
It will keep you warm and safe and dry.
But the revision is more like someone’s dream
house. After a lot of hard work, it’s the best it can possibly be. That’s what
makes people excited to read it.
For me, revision happens in
two stages—changes I make on my own before submitting the manuscript and
changes I make based on my editor’s suggestion.
When
I’m revising on my own, I think about things like text scaffolding, voice, and
word choice. I’ll talk about the first of these elements—text scaffolding—today.
As
you probably know, when a teacher utilizes instructional scaffolding, she gives
students the support they need to gradually learn a new skill or concept. In the same way, a writer can provide support to help readers
understand a complex idea.
Because children have limited prior knowledge and may
have trouble thinking abstractly, nonfiction books often include clusters of
sentences that slowly build an explanation. Writers start by meeting readers
where they are. Then they craft a series of connected sentences that act like
building blocks to guide student thinking as they gradually develop an
understanding of the concept.
To create a successful scaffold, a writer has to
understand the content inside and out and then carefully construct an
explanation one sentence at a time. This process usually involves quite a bit of
revising as the writer attempts to include all the important details in a clear
and engaging way. Here’s an example from the spread about giant pandas.
Here’s the main text of my first draft with changes
marked.
When I wrote this draft, the previous double-page
spread was about baby elephants, which also eat their mom’s poop. Eventually, I
decided to cut the elephant and talk about both kinds of poop eating here. This
had two advantages.
—It gave me room for more disgusting animal behaviors.
—I could avoid referring to the previous spread. This
was important because in browsable books, readers should be
able to skip around if they want to.
Now I could start with the birth of the baby panda, so
I moved part of paragraph 3 to paragraph 1. Check out the blue text. I added some info about drinking mother’s
milk, and then used text scaffolding to explain why the baby eats dung in the
new paragraph 2.
In the new third paragraph, I used more text scaffolding to
explain why the mother panda also eats poop. If you look closely at the red and
green text, you can see how I incorporated it into the revision.
Here’s the section after it was revised.
is a big improvement. And here’s the final spread.
Next
week, I’ll share an example of revising this same section to improve the voice
and word choice, two elements that are closely connected.
Most Popular Posts
Resignation
Re-thinking “E” Is for Everyone
We Need Diverse Nonfiction
The 5 Kinds of Nonfiction
Behind the Books: Does Story Appeal to Everyone?
10 STEM Picture Books
Nonfiction Authors Dig Deep by Melissa Stewart
Nonfiction Authors Dig Deep by Deborah Heiligman
Is It Fiction or Nonfiction? A Twitterchat
5 Kinds of Nonfiction, Book Lists
Topics