no single best way

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Home : 2002 : July : 4

no single best way
By J/IA

That was the topic of many a discussion among my staff. I choose to take the advice of the people who developed the model and follow the order they have set out, and without the material in front of me (and having been on
vacation for a month chasing my children!!) I struggle to remember for sure the order! I know the first two and last one are right: ideas and content, organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency, conventions. The biggest discrepency among the teachers were those WC, V, and SF traits--again, I just went with the way the program is laid out in their material. If you go to their website

it will list them out. The thinking was if you don't have the ideas and content you can't do much else, if your writing isn't organized it will take away from the piece so much so that the other traits have less impact, then the others are a little more gray. The thing about conventions is it needs to be taught all along the way--plan on a couple MLs per week focusing in on editing issues (whatever are appropriate for your grade level). I've eliminated my DOL work in favor of this--keeping our editing connected to the writing we do in class. DOL was so disconnected, and why invest all that time with that when the students could be applying these skills to their own writing?