Expansion is just what it sounds like: adding details and expanding ideas.  This is a great place to teach modifiers, but don’t get too carried away with adjectives and adverbs.  E.B. White said, “It is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.”  Students do need descriptive language peppered throughout their papers, but too much is overkill.

Teach students to ask the who, what, when, where, how, and why about what they write. Teach them to pretend the audience knows nothing about their topic and that they  need to leave the readers with no unanswered questions.  They have something to say; we just have to help them say it.

Slotting is another part of cleaning up the mess during revision. I talk with students about what a slot is and then we discuss taking out overused words and replacing the slot with more descriptive vocabulary.  We make a list of  overused words  to post on our word wall , and we call these dead words.  We then use the thesaurus to help find vobabulary that we can use to replace the dead words.  The lists are posted on the word wall, placed on the SMARTBoard, and written in their writing notebooks for them to refer to during revision. Together we look at their papers and highlight words they have overused. Then they use their lists and write new words above the old ones.

Some commonly overused words are good, bad, cute, nice, little, big, said, and old.  Let these be a starting place for your class as they begin to slot.  Tell them from the beginning that “Said is dead,” and you choose not to see it quite so often.  I do give them a chance to use, but not overuse, these on words on occasion.

Next time, we will look at sentence-combining.  Until then, I hope you try expansion and slotting and see some great results.