Citation: Anderson, J. (2007). Everyday editing: inviting students to develop skill and craft in writer’s workshop. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Reviewed by Mary Tedrow, NBCT
High School English and Journalism
Co-Director, Northern Virginia Writing Project

It is always a pleasure to read a book by a truly joyful educator, and
there are few disciplines – outside of the field of mathematics – more
in need of joy than the study of grammar. Jeff Anderson seems to be
just the person to impart pleasure to a task most often seen as
drudgery. A classroom teacher, Anderson has the requisite personality
trait shared by so many master middle school teachers – a sense of
humor. He adds to that the insight to celebrate student success and
inspire otherwise distracted seventh graders to beg for more. “Please,
Mr. Anderson, we want to write more!” must be the chant in his
classroom.

I did not need to be convinced to accept Anderson’s main premise that
traditional instruction in grammar through isolated “drill and kill”
does nothing to improve the craft of writing (although he builds a
creditable argument with current research in his introduction and Part
I). I have done my own classroom testing to arrive at the same
conclusion: Teaching grammar in isolation rarely transfers to writing.
Worse, it barely even moves the needle on a student’s ability to
recognize and correct errors on those omnipresent standardized tests.

Anderson maintains, and I agree, that students learn from doing and the teacher
must transfer the job of editing to them. His philosophy shifts the
grammar game from identifying error to promoting and celebrating
success. He also relieves the teacher from the time-consuming and often
fruitless task of correcting errors. A paper full of red marks sends
only one message to a novice writer: “I can’t write.” And keeping kids
writing is the main goal of any writing classroom.

The genius of Anderson’s book is in demonstrating how to restructure
lessons into student-centered inquiries. Anderson weds William Purkey
and Paula Stanley’s invitational teaching concepts to strong writing
models and adds many opportunities for experimentation. In every lesson
Anderson begins with mentor models of sentence structures taken from
books the students are reading and invites his students to tell each
other what they notice. Through discussion and repeated modeling, the
students identify the sentence patterns that exemplify the grammar
lesson being taught. These patterns become opportunities for students
to adapt what they observe, using their own words and ideas.

Clearly,Anderson’s method is applicable to any grammar lesson on any grade
level (and in any language). And each lesson includes what we know
works with student writers: ownership of the learning, opportunities
for social interaction, a celebratory and supportive environment for
novice writers, sentence combining, imitation, and choice. To add to
the mix, Anderson shares mnemonics that have proven effective for
helping kids remember the rules.

What every teacher should love is what Anderson generously shares –
basically the contents of his most successful lessons. This is a book
that can be used tomorrow in any classroom because Anderson has done
the legwork that would otherwise make teachers hesitant to adopt his
method. He has collected and reproduced the mentor sentences that teach
the rules and inspire students to write more.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I explores the theory behind
his invitational lessons. If this were all that were offered, most
teachers would “get it” and begin to restructure their own lessons. But
in Part II Anderson gives specifics on how to teach 10 grammar basics,
any one of which an English teacher would consider essential. Among
them are paragraphing, using strong verbs, and mastering simple,
compound and complex sentence structures. All the mentor sentences are
engaging, particularly to the middle level reader, and the follow up
instruction and writing prompts for each skill is included.

For my high school classroom, I will want to search our required
reading for my own mentor sentences to use with Advanced Placement
juniors. And I will keep Part I at my fingertips, so I can answer with
authority the challenge from teachers, administrators, and parents who
want to know why I’m not marking every error on a student’s paper.