Writing is a Process

The boy’s writing assignment for this week was to write a description of a sunken ship. The Wife did the heavy lifting with him, having him think about words that could be used to describe a ship, think about what it might look like down there in the ship. She even had him look up shipwreck pictures on the web.

Today, it yielded a first draft:

Catherine couldn’t believe she was next to a sunken ship. It was very rusty. Also very dirty. If you touched it hard enough it would brake. She found out the ship was hit by a cannon and smashed all the air tight chamber. She saw a lot of fish and squid swiming inside the sunken ship. She could just barely see what the color of the ship was. It was red, black and white. It also had multicolored coral on it. The ship looked like it was almost snaped in half. It was laying on its side. Every on aboard was safe. Catherine could tell because there were no bodies.

The usual melange of typos, sentence fragments and problems with changing tense at inopportune times. It’s also a good start.

The Wife worked through it with him for a bit and turned into this:

Catherine couldn’t believe she was next to a sunken ship. It was very rusty and dirty. If you touched it hard enough it would break into pieces. She noticed that the ship looked like it was hit by a cannon, it was almost snapped in half and laying on its side. Whatever hit it ruined all all the air tight chambers. She saw a lot of fish and squid swimming in the ship. Catherine could just barely see the color of the ship. It had been red, black and white. Multicolored coral was growing on it. Catherine did not see any skeletons so she assumed no one perished. When she gets back she will tell her friends and family what she found.

So the typos are fixed and the fragments are gone and most of the tense problems are gone. Without question a better version than the original. He added the bit about what Catherine will do when she gets back, which reads kind of like an after thought. Something like “She couldn’t wait to tell her friends about her experience” would be better. Although it might have been better to leave it out altogether- he switched abruptly from a nice description to dealing with what Catherine was doing. Strictly speaking, I’m not even sure the first sentence is necessary for the paragraph. Certainly, it works as part of a story, but for just a descriptive paragraph, it’s unnecessary.

That being said, that’s what he’ll be turning in. As I said last week, it’s his work and his threshold for reworking a paragraph is pretty low. He’ll read more and that alone will improve his writing. It doesn’t have to all happen right now.

The Wife’s approach resulted in little drama for this assignment. While I’m hopeful that these results can be duplicated, there’s a part of me that figures he’ll be in tears and screaming about the next one. That’s usually what happens just about the time we think we’ve got thing figured out.