Atelier d'Écriture: Commenting Guide

Bonjour à tous! Merci et bienvenus! Today's post serves as an extension of IB French Survival Guide's Atelier d'Écriture. In part one of this writing guide, I urged you to form writing groups with classmates to help improve your writing. We discussed the idea of writing as a social activity and today we will expand on that.

This Commenting Guide, will help guide your editing and rewriting process. It will provide you with a framework to work with when editing  your rough drafts. My hope is that it will provide you with a valuable resource to aid in the development of successful writing strategies that will help your writing flourish. 

As an editor, you can use this "commenting guide," that is, a set of questions or guidelines for reading a work in progress that will help focus your attention on specific issues in the text. For ideas about what to look for when you analyse a paper, study the following list; it provides some general issues to address and some strategies for commenting.

In responding to any given paper, use only four to seven items from the list; rather than addressing every item, choose the issues that best suit the particular paper. If you are commenting on your very own rough draft, you may want to discuss only the paper's content and thesis; it is probably premature to work on the paper's style at this stage.

Content
▪Which  section do you find the most interesting?
▪Is there anything in the draft you do not understand?
▪Do you strongly agree of disagree with any of the ideas?
▪Can you think of any ideas the author could add?

Thesis
▪What do you think the thesis is?
▪Is the thesis stated anywhere in the paper? If so, where? If you are not sure, ask the writer to tell you the point of the paper. Write down his or her answer word for word.
▪Is this thesis narrow enough for a paper of this length? If not, suggest an alternative statement.
▪Could the thesis be worded more precisely? If so, suggest a change in wording.
▪Do you think a different thesis would work better, given the paper's ideas?
▪Number each paragraph. On a separate sheet of paper, list the numbers and next to each  number write the main idea of the paragraph. Does any paragraph have more than one idea?
▪Is any paragraph missing a topic sentence?
▪Is any section unnecessarily repetitious or out of place?

Development
▪What in the paper would you like to know more about? As the writer explains the point, have one person in your writing group take notes.
▪Where would additional examples clarify the area that puzzles you? Suggest a specific example the author could add.

Style
▪Which words or sentences impress you the most, and why?
▪Find three general terms that could be replaced with specific ones. Suggest alternatives. 
▪Find three instances of any combination of forms of être, avoir, or il y a that could be replaces with stronger verbs. Suggest alternatives. 
▪Is the tone of the paper appropriate to the subject, audience, and occasion of the task at hand?
▪Indicate any section that could benefit from greater variety in sentence structure. Suggest different wordings. ​

You can download a PDF of this document by clicking HERE.