Poor President Trump!
Pour on Those Tweets and We'll Pore Over Them

Oh no!  Our Dear Leader is being trolled by some no-account novelist (fake writer!) over his misuse of the word pour in a recent tweet.  How unfair of Rowling to expect a busy man like the President to worry over niggling things like grammar and proper usage when communicating his profound thoughts to the waiting world, 140 characters at a time.

And here's the lesson, boys and girls--good editing skills are a necessity for us mere mortals.  Great and Powerful Men, like OZ and Trump, may not have to worry about problematic homophones, but the rest of us do, lest our readers think us uneducated and careless.  Being able to carefully edit one's own writing for mechanical and usage mistakes is a vital skill that all language arts students must master. 

Revision is an important part of the writing process (a step that most students, I find, hate) that will improve the focus and organization of any piece of writing.  Editing is the final polishing of the gem--checking for all the little surface mistakes that invariably surface.  Revision is certainly the more important of the two, because that's about content; however, readers are very likely to judge writers harshly on surface mistakes because they're easier to identify and smirk at (as opposed to the deeper problems of focus and organization, more difficult to identify clearly, which is why less effective writing teachers focus over much on surface errors and not of the deeper problems). 

So, how to help your writing students become better editors?  To begin with, they need to know the applicable rules for spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and so forth.  This means direct instruction of the incredibly boring minutiae of language, but there's no getting around that.  Our modern word processors do an amazing job of pointing out many errors, but that's no substitute for careful editing.  Then practice: Purdue OWL offers some great on-line instruction and practice; editing classmates' writing is also a good exercise.  Students need to get into the habit of reading their work slowly, word for word--they know what they meant to say, but do the words on the paper actually say that? 

And as for Mr. Trump's particular error: mixing up similar-sounding words is a common error.  English has a great number of homophones and homographs, and it takes direct instruction to make writers aware of them.  Take a look at this workbook of homophones and see if it might fit your instructional needs (click onto image):

Geez, I hope there are no errors in this post--that'd be ironic, huh?