WHAT IT IS:

From Writing Better (Graham & Harris, 2005), the COPS strategy is a student self-editing acronym.

HOW IT WORKS:

COPS is a strategy to help students remember how to “police” their writing–evaluate for accuracy and mechanics. The COPS acronym stands for:

C – have I Capitalized the first word and proper nouns?

O – how is the Overall appearance?

P – have I used end Punctuation, commas, and semicolons correctly?

S – do the words look like they are Spelled correctly? Can I sound them out, or should I use a dictionary?

These reminders are not going to be exhaustive for all focus areas students may need to correct but instead attempt to provide a baseline expectation for all student writing at the secondary level.