Making Poetry Powerful
End-of-season Revision Tips
It’s the end of the season and your students have experimented with many types of poems.
These first attempts often contain seeds for great poetry that need help growing. Below are
some tips to help your students transform their drafts and notes into poetry they will be excited
to perform at the Poetry Slam. Be sure to model how you would apply these strategies to your
own writing or even a student’s writing as part of a mini-lesson you present before allowing
your students to work on their own poetry. And remember, students are allowed to write and
think about their poems outside of the America SCORES writing class!
1. Use powerful, precise verbs and nouns. When working on a first draft, students don’t always
concentrate on word choice. Show students how they could improve a sentence like, “I go
home,” by replacing the word “go” with a stronger verb like skip, fly, bounce or roll. Copy one
of your own poems on a piece of chart paper and model how you might underline words that
could be stronger and replace them. Then give students time to add more powerful verbs
and nouns to their own poems. They can do this independently or with a partner. If you
notice that students have lots of adjectives and adverbs it is often a sign of week nouns and
verbs. For example, instead of “quiet voices,” one could use “whispers.”
2. Add focus by “slowing down” and “blowing up a moment.” Young poets often write poems
with several promising big ideas which lack focus or detail. Encourage students to choose one
of these ideas and “blow it up” instead of quickly moving to another topic. For example, if a
student wrote something like, “Clowns, monsters, fighting, losing, these things don’t frighten me
at all,” encourage her to choose one of those topics and add more details. Show a poem a
student wrote on chart paper. Model how you might draw an arrow from a spot that could
be “blown up” and add to it. Remember, sometimes the best revisions are deletions.
3. Use comparisons! Write the following list of prompts on the board:
Hot like _____________
Cold like ____________
Color like ____________
Looks like ___________
Feels like ____________
Smells like ___________
Tastes like ___________
Sounds like ___________
Encourage students to use the “like what” list to describe things in fresh, new ways. For
example, instead of saying, “I felt angry,” try, “My anger was blue like fire.” Write a poem on
the board and demonstrate how you might choose a word and bring it to life using this list.
As with any lesson, it is important that you demonstrate how you would revise a poem before
you ask students to make changes. Note that students do not have to rewrite entire poems.
Encourage them to use arrows or carrots and offer to type up a good copy of their finished
piece. Emphasize that these strategies aren’t just for revising, they are for writing too!