Making Student Voice Stronger Through Revising Commentary by Lisa Gusewelle

Heather presenting on revising commentary at the C3WP Mid-Year Meeting in Atlanta, Feb 9-10, 2019

Finding evidence is easy. Having that evidence effectively support a claim is not. Young writers often struggle with interacting with evidence and find it difficult to add more on to what is already an educated response by an authoritative source. However, teaching young writers how to respond to evidence and to use it support their ideas gives them agency to add their own voice and experience, which are always undervalued, to the argument that they are writing.

I really looked forward to the Revising for Commentary mini-unit session led by National Writing Project teacher consultants Jameka Thomas and Heather Payne. I often struggle helping articulate to my students how to write commentary after introducing evidence. My students often want to put, "I agree with [this source]," and leave it at that. They often are unsure of how to bridge the evidence's ideas and theirs into one.

Thomas and Payne led our group in helping us notice and name several moves that writers make when writing effective commentary. My favorite mentioned in the session are students giving personal or hypothetical examples, providing a sense of urgency or explaining how large the problem is, using comparison and contrast or cause and effect. This gives concrete details that I can provide to my students to best support them with the difficult task of writing commentary.

If you are interested in helping your students better articulate their responses to evidence by connecting it to a claim - or even a thesis for an informative paper -, I recommend using this mini-unit. It does take 3 to 5 days to implement, but it provides our students with opportunities to go back and revise their writing to be more purposeful or to have conversations about finding opportunities to further the strength of our writing.