Three Passes Over a Third Grader's Draft
Here is a third grader's draft, typed exactly as written.
my dog Rocket can jump higher then any dog on our street. He runs so fast that his ears fly back like two flags. last saturday he chased a squirrel up the oak tree and he barked and barked and barked and barked until my mom called him inside. "Rocket come here!" she yelled. Me and my brother laughed so hard that we had to sit down on the steps.
The class checklist says: capital letters for names and the start of sentences; the right word, not the sound-alike; and sentences that read smoothly when read aloud. The teacher tells the class to fix the draft in three passes - capitals, word choice, sentence fluency - and reminds them that every change must be explainable with a rule, not just "it looks better."
1. Find and fix the capitalization and word-choice problems. For each fix, name the rule, and explain why the "then/than" error is the kind a spell-check will miss.
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Capital letters:
- my becomes My - the first word of a sentence.
- last saturday becomes Last Saturday - first word of a sentence plus a day of the week.
- Rocket is already capitalized and should stay that way, because it is the dog's name. Do not "fix" it.
Word choice: higher then becomes higher than. Than compares two things; then tells when something happens. Test it by swapping: "higher then any dog" would mean the jumping happened next, which makes no sense.
A spell-check misses this because then is spelled correctly - it is simply the wrong word. Only a meaning check catches it. Students should read the sentence with each word and ask which job the word is doing: comparing or timing.
2. Rewrite the squirrel run-on so it reads smoothly without losing the barking. Explain your change, and why deleting all four "barked"s would be a worse revision.
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Model revision: Last Saturday he chased a squirrel up the oak tree. He barked and barked until my mom called him inside.
What I changed: split the run-on at a natural break (the chase ends, the barking begins), added the capitals, and kept two barkeds instead of four. The four ands chained clauses until the sentence lost its shape.
Deleting every repeat would be worse because the repetition is doing a job: it shows how long the dog carried on. He barked until my mom called him inside is shorter but quieter - the reader no longer hears a dog who wouldn't stop. Repetition in a young writer's draft is often voice, not a mistake. The fluency fix belongs to punctuation and sentence boundaries, not to erasing the writer's personality. Keep the meaning; repair the structure.
3. A student fixes the quoted line by writing: "Rocket, come here"! she yelled. Explain what is still wrong and why the comma and the punctuation mark matter.
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Two problems remain.
- The exclamation point must go inside the quotation marks, because the excited words are what she yelled: "Rocket, come here!"
- The sentence needs its own end punctuation after the tag, so it reads: "Rocket, come here!" she yelled. The quote's punctuation and the sentence's structure are separate jobs.
The comma after Rocket is correct and should be kept - it shows the speaker is addressing the dog by name. Without it, Rocket come here reads as if Rocket is a command rather than a name. On convention questions, check three places every time: the comma for direct address, the punctuation inside the closing quote, and the capital letter that starts the spoken words.