About the Project

A teacher wrote a letter to her students, but it is filled with spelling and grammatical errors. Your class has been asked to peer edit the letter and correct the mistakes before the teacher sends the letter to her class.

This assignment challenges students to find spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. Use this assignment to review spelling and grammar rules or to demonstrate the commenting and revision tools available in Google Docs.

Lesson Overview

You can use the sample document linked below or create your own if you are trying to focus on specific writing corrections like run-on or incomplete sentences.

To begin, you will want to provide each student in your class with a copy of the sample letter. The easiest way to do this is through Google Classroom.

1. Create a new assignment
2. Attach your copy of the student essay
3. Make sure you use the “make a copy for each student” option
4. Post the assignment.

Great! Now that all of your students have their own copy of the template you can teach them how to correct and revise using the tools available through Google Docs.

Suggestion mode in Google Docs

Ask students to read through the letter and correct errors that they notice.

If there are portions of the essay that don’t make sense, have them leave a comment with suggestions for improvement.

You may want to review how to add a comment, turn on “suggesting mode”, or run the spelling and grammar check.

Screenshot of the corrected document.

Tips and Suggestions

Some of the errors in the provided sample will not be noted by running spelling and grammar check. This gives you an opportunity to stress the importance of having someone proof-read writing assignments.

You can turn this assignment into a contest by having students exchange documents after they have been reviewed to see if they missed any mistakes.

Use this assignment as an opportunity to talk about constructive criticism. Have each student add one or more comments that would help the writer of this essay improve without hurting their feelings or being mean.

This will set a good foundation for future peer editing activities.

Lesson Resources

• Find the error template
• Enable suggestion mode in Google Docs
• Adding comments to a Google Document
• Tips for peer editing