Editing Writing, what do I do?

I've been thinking all term, how do I teach students to edit their own work effectively without it being a chore?

I tried:

Peer editing
Editing your own work at the end of a session


Both of these types worked but the students weren't engaged at all.

Today we discussed who the audience is for our writing, people all over the world who read our blogs.  Students were asked to peer up and read one story at a time, they needed to check that the stories made sense, and that the reader would be able to understand what they were talking about.

I gave students 3 minutes for each story in their peers, I encouraged them to talk about their story, and different ways they could make it better.  Doing this gave them no time to muck around and they all got straight into it.

This worked well with the boys as they were able to work with a friend and there was a time limit (a challenge).  What more could a boy ask for?

Reflecting on this lesson, next time I do this I would use a rubric for the students to explicitly show what they are focusing on, for eg. Punctuation or Sentence Structure.  I would have this at the top of the writing document that they are working on, then they are able to see exactly what they are focusing on during that session.  I will give them a scoring system to rate their writing out of 4.  When it turns into a competition they always want to be better, which will hopefully make their writing better. They will be able to compete against each other to get a better score which will end in a better piece of writing overall.