When I was teaching second graders to write I always insisted they make a plan first. Sometimes the plan was just a picture or maybe a list of words to use, and sometimes it was a web with the main idea in the middle. Kids didn’t always take kindly to writing that plan. They just wanted to get into the business of writing down their words. They wanted to get it done.

I recently had an article come back to me needing revision. I mean, it really needed revision. As I reread my own paragraphs I could barely recognize my hand in the mess. I spent a day trying to make some sense out of the 1500 word disaster and very nearly trashed the entire piece. I went to my computer and gleaned out one great idea that I’d used to begin the piece, wrote several paragraphs on it and realized that it was an entirely different topic than the one I was supposed to be addressing. ( I saved it for future use:) 🙂

Finally on day two of revising I sat down and did what I made those poor little children do during writer’s workshop. I wrote out a plan–a web with the topic in the middle and little circles all around for the sub-topics. Wow! It worked! I got busy and followed that critter and by the end of the day I had an article that made sense. It may still need a little tweak here and there, but it’s not the rambling, scramble it was before. Sometimes we just need to take a dose of our own medicine.