Teaching the fundamentals of writing composition shouldn’t be boring. It should be active, engaging, and EMPOWERING! Most students, whether they consciously articulate it or not, want to vanquish their writing anxiety. They want to develop confidence in their ability to compose and revise strong prose that will help them thrive in coursework and the workplace. These students, however, enter writing-intensive college courses with an increasingly-limited foundation in compositional knowledge. While they may have “written a lot” in previous high school and college classes, few have taken classes grounded in teaching the mechanics and fundamentals necessary to break down writing, diagnose and articulate underperforming elements, and strategically implement revisions. Students have a right to their own language and their own voice, and teaching the building blocks of sentence and paragraph composition should not be defined as a way to “standardize” English. Quite the opposite! Students are more likely and better able to craft and communicate their authentic voice when they understand the building blocks of sentence and paragraph composition. But this kind of “down in the sentence” instruction takes times and careful scaffolding.

This instructor’s guide provides educators with a series of active-learning-based lesson plans (or “revision clinics”) designed to teach concrete revision strategies at the sentence and paragraph level. These lessons focus on empowering students to become autonomous editors of their own and others’ writing by addressing their skill gaps in identifying weak, underperforming writing and revising it for strategic impact. The lesson plans, templates, and accompanying notes we provide are rooted in active learning pedagogy – the philosophy that students acquire skills more effectively when they engage directly in the learning process in a hands-on way.