This mini-lesson describes a self-editing activity in which students look closely at their writing, marking speaking parts, and then make corrections. Using highlighters or colored fonts, students mark parts of their text to indicate where dialogue is occurring. Then students examine their writing to locate areas where they have not applied the conventions of punctuation correctly. This lesson provides students with a visual aid to see writing errors and teaches them to use punctuation to clarify their writing. (author/ncl)

This lesson teaches dialogue composition and correct paragraphing. The Character Clash instruction sheet and the Dialogue Tag sheet are very informative and explain the 50 minute lesson well. Note: Adobe Reader is required to open the linked lesson sheets.