Editing makes good prose better
Presidents wield pens in writing process

The nonfiction writing process has three major components:

• Planning

• Putting down paragraphs

• Polishing

Students (and many other writers) give short shrift to planning and polishing. Professional writers put the bulk of their effort into those two components.

Although students usually have to learn the value of editing through trial and error, you may be able to encourage them by example. If you cannot get examples of editing by Lady Gaga and Tiger Woods, you might have to settle for a couple of famous U. S. presidents.

The White House posted to Flickr an Official White House Photo by Pete Souza of President Barack Obama editing a speech on health care in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president's address to a joint session of Congress. The photo shows an extensively annotated document. I had hoped to reproduce the photo here, but it is not in the public domain. You can show it to your students by means of the link.

The Library of Congress documents collection holds copies of the Declaration of Independence, which was prepared by a team, shows extensive editing by Thomas Jefferson, who later became the third president of the United States.

If your students are taking American history, they might want to watch the 2008 TV miniseries John Adams. The second episode of the series shows John Adams and Ben Franklin discussing what the document should say and telling Jefferson to write it. Later they come back to criticize Jefferson's wording.