5 Pointers to Help Your Child Tackle Editing This Year

Every oth­er month, we gath­er with a select group of MOE teach­ers to talk about our stu­dents and the lat­est exam­i­na­tion trends set by the Sin­ga­pore Exam­i­na­tion and Assess­ment Board (SEAB). It was dur­ing our most recent get-togeth­er last week that we con­firmed some­thing sur­pris­ing we had pre­vi­ous­ly observed.

In addi­tion to your usu­al sus­pects like Com­pre­hen­sion Close and Vocab­u­lary Close, Pri­ma­ry 5 and 6 stu­dents were also los­ing a lot of pre­cious Paper 2 marks in the Edit­ing sec­tion this year. Stu­dents were mis­spelling words and mak­ing mis­takes in cor­rect­ing erro­neous gram­mar.

This is wor­ry­ing, and it must be put to a stop for your child to score in Eng­lish. Edit­ing is not a dif­fi­cult sec­tion and can be eas­i­ly aced if approached in a sys­tem­at­ic way. We are going to show you just what we mean.

1. Understand what Editing is testing 

The Edit­ing sec­tion com­pris­es 12 ques­tions worth a total of 12 marks. 6 ques­tions are ded­i­cat­ed to spelling mis­takes and anoth­er 6 ques­tions are ded­i­cat­ed to gram­mat­i­cal mis­takes. Stu­dents are expect­ed to ‘edit’ the mis­takes.

When the under­lined word in the ques­tion is spelt incor­rect­ly, you have run into a spelling mis­take. Look at the screen­shot of an Edit­ing exer­cise below.

2. Know how to spot a spelling mistake. Know what to do! 

When the under­lined word in the ques­tion is spelt incor­rect­ly, you have run into a spelling mis­take. Look at the screen­shot of an Edit­ing exer­cise below. 

Ques­tions 6, 7 and 9 are words that are obvi­ous­ly spelt wrong­ly, where­as “from” is spelt cor­rect­ly in ques­tion 8. For ques­tions 6,7 and 9, the student’s job is straight­for­ward. They only need to cor­rect the spelling of the word and are not required to change the word or the word form. For exam­ple, for ques­tion 6, the stu­dent just has to spell “rec­om­mend” cor­rect­ly. They do not have to change “rec­om­mend” to any oth­er word, or to oth­er word forms such as “rec­om­mends”, “rec­om­mend­ed”, “rec­om­mend­ing” or “rec­om­men­da­tion”.

3. Know how to spot a grammatical mistake. Know what to do! 

In the same screen­shot above, ques­tion 8 is a gram­mat­i­cal mis­take. Why? Because “from” is spelt cor­rect­ly. This means that as long as the under­lined word is spelt cor­rect­ly, the mis­take will be a gram­mat­i­cal one instead of a spelling mis­take. When stu­dents encounter gram­mat­i­cal mis­takes, their task is to change the word or the word form. In this case, they have to change the word “from” to the cor­rect prepo­si­tion, “by.”

4. Know how to spell commonly misspelled words

Par­ents always ask us how they can pre­pare their chil­dren for the spelling mis­takes in Edit­ing. There are 2 effec­tive ways for this pur­pose. First, prac­tice the Edit­ing sec­tion from past year exam papers. This is good because school teach­ers like to test stu­dents to spell the same bunch of words. Sec­ond, Google “com­mon­ly mis­spelled words.” There will be a num­ber of web­sites which will give you a list of words. Many of these words fre­quent­ly get test­ed in Edit­ing. Here are 10 words teach­ers sim­ply love to test: Edi­ble Irre­sistible Occurred / Occur­rence Main­te­nance Aggres­sive Itin­er­ary Hygiene Rhythm Pos­ses­sion Jew­ellery.

Here are 10 words teach­ers sim­ply love to test:

1. Edi­ble

2. Irre­sistible

3. Occurred / Occur­rence

4. Main­te­nance

5. Aggres­sive

6. Itin­er­ary

7. Hygiene

8. Rhythm

9. Pos­ses­sion

10. Jew­ellery

5. Know some commonly tested question types for grammar

In addi­tion to prepo­si­tion­al errors, stu­dents will almost cer­tain­ly be test­ed on errors in tens­es. Let’s look at ques­tion 3 in the screen­shot below. The word “gave” is wrong because it is in the wrong tense. The cor­rect tense should be present tense because the entire sen­tence is in present tense such as “you are always there.” As such, “gave” in past tense should be changed to the present tense “give.”

Anoth­er com­mon­ly test­ed ques­tion type is what we call the “-ing after a com­ma” rule. For instance, for ques­tion 4 above, the cor­rect answer is “guid­ing” and not “guid­ed.” We make it sim­ple for our stu­dents by telling them that when they see a com­ma right before the under­lined word, chances are the word must be cor­rect­ed to its “-ing” form.

Final­ly, one of the most com­mon­ly test­ed ques­tion types for gram­mar is the present per­fect or past per­fect tense which requires stu­dents to change the under­lined word to its past par­tici­ple form. For exam­ple, for ques­tion 5, “be” is in the wrong form because it is not in its past par­tici­ple form. “Has, have and had” are always paired with a past par­tici­ple when they are used in the present or past per­fect tense. As the past par­tici­ple form of “be” is “been,” the cor­rect answer is “been.”

These 5 point­ers we have giv­en will go a long way to help your child avoid los­ing unnec­es­sary marks in the Edit­ing sec­tion. For more tips and guid­ance on improv­ing Edit­ing or any oth­er sec­tions, feel free to read the oth­er arti­cles in our blog.

Bet­ter yet, join our class­es and expe­ri­ence the qual­i­ty and mag­ic of Think Teach. We devote our­selves to com­pos­ing suc­cess sto­ries. Will your child be next?