Playful editing peer prompts!
Our facilitator Ben McKenzie has put together the perfect accompaniment for our Creative Cuppa teacher workshop on playful editing.
Editing can be a stressful part of creative writing for many students. They are used to seeing only the finished versions of professional authors’ work, so the editing process is hidden and mysterious to them! But one of the ways to make it easier is to also make it fun - spending as much time playing with a story’s ideas, characters and settings as with its spelling and grammar.
One of the ways we facilitate this at 100 Story Building is to have students give each other feedback on each others’ writing, focusing on the positive. We often find it helpful to give students playful sentence starters or other prompts to get them to think about different aspects of each others’ stories; here are a few you can use in your classroom!
These prompts focus on what’s great about the story as it is:
My favourite thing that happened was...
The most exciting part was…
The funniest bit was when…
The thing that most surprised me was…
I never expected to read that…
The sentence I wish I had written is…
My favourite word in this story was…
The bit I could imagine the most clearly was…
The bit I wish would happen in real life was…
The bit I hope never happens in real life was…
I felt closest to the main character when…
I have been inspired by the part with....
These prompts are positive ways to suggest things the writer might want to add or expand on:
The biggest question I have is…
If I could talk to the main character, I’d tell them...
The place in the story I wish I could visit is…
I wanted to know more about…
Make your own by discussing with your class what kinds of things they most love about their favourite stories, and using those ideas to shape how they look at each other’s writing! And of course you can tweak these ones to suit the genre, theme and tone of the stories your class is working on. Try using just two or three at a time; you can always have multiple rounds of peer feedback!
Illustration by Brendan Barnett
Spots are still available for our next Creative Cuppa teacher workshop ‘Playful Editing’ on Thursday 18 November. 4pm - 5pm, tickets only $15.
Illustration by Brendan Barnett
