Middle school is a great time to start teaching students essential skills, such as how to proofread their writing. Students are expected to start taking their writing more seriously, and this is often the time when they need to start producing longer pieces of writing, such as essays, creative writing, book reports, research papers, etc.
But why is proofreading important?
While students could, of course, just write an essay or a story and hand it in once they’re finished, this is not a good idea and should not be encouraged. Proofreading their writing is very important as it helps students to:
- Find spelling mistakes, typos, or inappropriate language.
- Ensure their writing makes sense, is clearly laid out, and is readable.
- Figure out any gaps in their essay or story – have they met the criteria of what was expected in their writing?
- Produce quality work with consistent formatting, fonts, and headings.
Learning how to proofread will help students understand the importance of ensuring their writing is clear, concise, effective, and professional.
This blog post will go over how you can teach your students how to proofread and make it enjoyable for everyone in the class.
Teaching Middle School Students How to Proofread
Teaching students how to proofread does not need to be difficult. In fact, with these simple tips, you’ll have your students proofreading in no time!
Ensure students know the basics of grammar.
Students need to understand basic grammar and punctuation when learning how to proofread. Without this, they won’t know what they’re looking for as they read through their writing. Start teaching students about grammar by providing lessons on types of verbs, types of nouns, adjectives, conjunctions, and other key parts of speech.
If you’re unsure where to start your grammar lesson, check out this Parts of Speech grammar unit. It will help your students to learn and understand the key parts of speech necessary for good writing. You can also incorporate punctuation in your lessons. This Middle School Punctuation Unit has 16 detailed lesson plans to help your students develop their punctuation skills.
You can also use this Grade 6 Grammar Unit if you teach a younger grade. This unit will help you teach students the basics of grammar, including pronouns, phrases, clauses, verb tenses, quotation marks, colons, and more.
For more advice on teaching grammar in the middle school classroom, read Effective and Engaging Ways to Teach Grammar and 10 Important Reasons to Teach Grammar in Middle School.
Give students the tools they need to proofread.
As students learn how to proofread, they might need some help knowing what they are looking for. Saying, “Now proofread your work!” is ineffective if your students don’t know how to proofread or what they should look for in terms of errors in their writing.
To help with this, you can provide them with some tools:
- Create a checklist highlighting common errors students might make in their writing—missing capital letters, periods or commas, etc.
- Create an anchor chart outlining the steps for proofreading, such as those from Juiceboxes and Crayons or from Amy Lemons.
- Provide students with a rubric to help them evaluate their writing – this can outline what you’re looking for when it comes time to evaluate their work. Use these Bump It Up Board Headers to showcase for students your assessment scale from Level One to Four.
Providing students with the necessary tools can help them focus on the process as they learn how to proofread.
Encourage students to create multiple drafts.
As said earlier in this post, students should not write one draft of their work and hand it in; the writing process for any writer, even the very successful ones, means creating multiple drafts.
Multiple drafts can look like this:
- Planning or brainstorming the topic in a jot-note format. (Planning)
- Writing research or notes in a graphic organizer to organize thoughts. (Organizing)
- Creating the first copy from notes. (Rough Draft)
- Rereading to ensure the writing flows and makes sense to the reader. (Second Draft)
- Editing the second draft for missing or wrong punctuation.
- Creating the final draft, the one they’ll hand in. (Final Draft)
Creating multiple drafts of their writing will ensure that students create quality work. Create an anchor chart of these different steps of writing so students can better understand them.
Teach students the importance of self-editing and peer review.
When learning how to proofread, students need to understand how to self-edit and use their peers to better develop and practice their proofreading skills.
Self-Editing
Teaching students how to self-edit their work is extremely beneficial. They should be encouraged to read their work out loud as if presenting it orally to the class.
Although they might not have to present their final copy this way, reading their work out loud (especially the early drafts) can help students catch mistakes in the flow and tone of their writing. They can also see the natural pauses or breaks where a comma or period might be helpful.
By reading their work out loud, students might also find that parts of their writing are confusing or hard to understand. Self-editing will help them catch these mistakes.
A bonus is that reading their work out loud will also help students work on their oral fluency skills.
Peer Review
Having students read their classmates’ writing can be very helpful. When students read their own writing, they might miss something that a classmate could catch during peer review. You can create a checklist for students that outlines what they should look for in each others’ writing. It is also beneficial for students to help co-create these “look fors” for peer writing.
You can also make peer review fun by creating stations for students to rotate through where each station has “student experts” checking for only one thing in each piece of writing, such as formatting, periods, capitalization, etc. As the teacher, you should be aware of each student’s strengths and skills and can assign them to different stations based on those skills.
You can also create small groups of students to be the editing team, and they can read through another student’s work and collaboratively come up with ideas on what needs to be addressed in the writing. To learn more about peer review, check out this post: Peer Feedback Teaching Strategy.
Don’t Rely 100% on Technology
There are a lot of technology options today for students to use to help them with proofreading. I believe that they need to be explicitly taught foundational proofreading skills before they can become reliant on technology to fix their work.
Have fun with proofreading and celebrate success.
Learning how to proofread does not have to be dull; you can make it fun for students in lots of ways, such as:
- Creating a scavenger hunt for students by giving them a text with errors and having them find the specific errors within that text.
- Using online proofreading quizzes or exercises to help students test their skills.
- Brainstorming common mistakes to look for and create a proofreading checklist with the class. You can make this checklist visually appealing and display it when students need a reference for their own proofreading.
- Giving students short stories to go through where they proofread and edit the text. Encourage them to suggest alternate words and details that could be added or have them restructure some of the sentences.
- Creating a proofreading contest in the class with small rewards for the winners. Set up stations for each contest where students have to find the errors in a passage, rewrite sentences, or find mistakes in punctuation. Make it a timed event to amp up the excitement.
Make sure students have opportunities to practice how to proofread regularly by using short writing passages or small pieces of text. Using these small assignments can help students continue to learn how to proofread consistently.
Also, ensure you provide constructive feedback to students when you review their writing. Rather than telling them there are mistakes, provide specific feedback. Ensure that students know why something might be incorrect and how to fix those errors. This will help them understand what errors they may have made in their writing or where changes could be made and better understand the proofreading process, which will benefit them as they continue their academic journey.
Proofreading can be a challenging skill for students to master, so make sure you celebrate their successes in class using positive reinforcement, such as stickers or a shout-out. When students are learning how to proofread, this celebration of their successes can encourage them to continue working on improving their skills.
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