Let’s talk about the CUPS Strategy for Student Editing — and no, not the kind that holds your coffee. CUPS stands for Capitalization, Usage, Punctuation, and Spelling, and it is one of those classroom tools that most know about but rarely feel confident teaching.

When I first started teaching, I would hand my students a CUPS checklist, tell them to edit, and then cross my fingers. I pretended that they knew what to do. Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

In all transparency, I didn’t really know how to teach CUPS. I knew what each letter stood for, but not how to model it, break it down, or help students understand what “check for usage” even meant. So instead of our writing/editing block being productive, we ended up wasting time circling random words and missing real errors.

Over the years, I taught myself and my students a simple way to teach the CUPS Strategy for Editing that made sense for my brain and theirs.

I created this method because I wanted my students to stop guessing and start understanding. I was tired of editing, feeling like a scavenger hunt, and seeing testing scores that reflected it. I wanted it to feel structured, clear, and more meaningful.

The routine I’m sharing in this episode is built around a simple pattern: Fix. Explain. Imitate.

When students fix a mistake, explain the rule, and imitate it in their own writing, they move beyond surface-level editing. They start noticing patterns and applying them in new contexts. It’s short, it’s structured, and it actually works.

The best part? It takes less than ten minutes a day.

• https://uniquelyupper.com/cups-strategy-for-student-editing/

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