o Overview

o Prewriting / Freewriting

o Drafting

o Revision

o Editing

o Polishing

As discussed in the Preface, the computer classroom can be an excellent place to teach students ways to make their writing process more efficient and more productive. At each phase, inventive instructors can integrate exercises and change writing patterns. This part of the manual applies one familiar scheme from standard composition theory, dividing the writing process into five stages--pre/freewriting. drafting, revision, editing, and polishing. The iterative or non-linear nature of the process should keep us from thinking that there are discrete "steps" or a single path toward writing success. Electronic text manipulation actually can encourage the kind of flexible, recursive thinking that characterizes and produces good writing.

All activities in the computer classroom should be seen in light of several hard-headed and common-sense principles. The literature on writing with computers comparing professional writers with students shows fundamental differences in the number of revisions and the kinds of changes. In general, inexperienced writers make fewer large-scale changes in their texts, preferring instead to replace one word with another, while keeping the essential form of the first draft. Experienced writers rearrange sentences far more frequently, making alterations at the clause level or larger; sentences get longer, get broken apart, and get placed in other positions. The same goes for larger units, paragraphs and sections: experienced writers don't just arrive at effective structures more readily, they are more likely to make major revisions that help their intended audience and improve impact at every level.

Exercises should cultivate the sophisticated revision skills that too many students lack: paragraph movement and rearrangement of sentences within paragraphs both help students use the drag and drop capacities for something besides cosmetic revision. Unless we design exercises that reward changes in basic computer editing behavior, we cannot expect writers to change old habits just by exposing them to the machines. The point of this manual, I hasten to add, is not to pretend to exhaustiveness or prescriptiveness, but to offer a few concrete suggestions so that inexperienced and experienced teachers alike can adapt smoothly and productively to the computer classroom environment.

In the Prewriting / Freewriting phase, students can simply use a blank word-processing document and begin writing, using whatever techniques you prescribe or describe. Written questions for discussion--printed on paper, written on the whiteboard displayed on the overhead, or distributed over the network--can provide the raw material for nutshelling or kernelling. Students can also avail themselves of Daedalus Invent question series, which provide a series of prompts, saving student responses for later reworking; due to some bugs in early versions of the Daedalus program, I was slow to integrate this tool into my own classroom work, though subsequent appendices may address this module. Because one of our tasks is to teach students more productive ways to approach a critical thinking problem--to follow a rigorous line of inquiry and break down complex issues into constituent parts--a question series customized to a particular task can be a very effective tool. The Daedalus Web site is a good place to start looking for specialized question series, and our resources page will add promising ones as they are developed.

The tyranny of the blank page can be difficult to overcome, but there are many ways to get our students to heed H.L. Mencken's advice, "Don't get it right, get it written" (and then rewrite!). The computer itself can aid in this process: turning down the screen brightness can be a liberating experience for some student writers, most of whom tend to polish and agonize instead of generating text.

I've found a good exercise is to have everyone turn down the brightness for ten minutes and type continuously, even simply typing "I don't know what to type" if that is what springs to mind; soon enough, boredom sets in and students get back on task. I encourage them to hit carriage returns when they feel they have lost their place, and then resume their spew. After the time has elapsed--time with the editing demons mercifully off their shoulders--have them turn the screen brightness back up, and save their work as "Mary's scratchpad" or some such file name.

An effective follow-up is to have them look at the results, clean up a little of the trash, and then pursue some selection routine. This can reinforce the notion of choosing a productive line from a range of approaches, rather than hoping (as many do) to chance upon a "right" one, or clinging to a single strategy. Sometimes all that is necessary is to say something like "Look carefully at what you have written, select a couple of topics to pursue, and try to formulate three statements that epitomize different approaches to the task."

As in other areas, we are trying to deal with the "cognitive overload" many writers feel as they try to decide too many things at once--form, content, style, tone, word choice, audience response, grade, etc. Obviously, structured approaches like these should be offered as trellises on which to grow, not straitjackets to hamper freedom. I have found that the simple act of breaking old patterns can have positive results, especially when dealing with complex processes.

Such recursive re-engagement with the freewriting phase is essential; some instructors successfully have students print out their freewriting, but I tend to keep things on the screen for a while longer. Too often, the printing queue takes so long that logistical tangles and delays overshadow the writing itself. The aim, obviously, is to stimulate the recursive process of writing and revisiting, to get away from the linear mode that many of our students still maintain as a model.

Whatever process I end up choosing, I include some drafting time in such sequences, to establish that the bulk of my text gets generated without constant editing and polishing on the fly. Even ten-minute draft sessions can be productive, especially if coordinated with conferencing sessions like Daedalus InterChange (see the Daedalus section). The instructor and the students can also develop prompts for improving and extending the existing drafts. In a well-laid-out computer classroom an instructor can move quickly around the room and offer suggestions on most of the work in progress, if that is appropriate for the exercise; usually, though, I try to avoid making people more self-conscious than they already are.

I've had many productive classes in which I submit myself to the same exercises my students do, and share my false starts and attempts with them on the projection screen afterwards. This can drive home the point that instructors don't just miraculously write well right out of the chute, but have to craft sentences and shape ideas while dealing with some of the same frustrations and difficulties. Used in conjunction with the overhead projector, such demonstrations invite class-wide collaboration, as an instructor can take students inside his or her creative process with questions like "What would the next step be here?" and "Which of these thoughts should I develop, and why?"

To stimulate the re-vision phase of the writing process (in the sense of re-seeing or re-reading, as opposed to the more conventional sense that our students have internalized, which is more like polishing), another pause is in order. At this point I often ask a question like "How do you see this piece shaping up? Take a moment and make a quick sketch map of where you want to lead the reader--from where to where to where." This is also a great chance to ask whether the writing done so far is suggesting other avenues of approach, whether the piece is answering the main questions posed in the assignment. If students decide that it isn't, you should give a little more time to point things in the right direction (here's where floating around the room can help, although you don't want to fall into the trap of putting a teacherly stamp of approval on everyone's work).

Here, unfortunately, is one of the limitations of the computer classroom: the lack of quick printing. Our students may eventually become better than we are at visualizing large scale documents on screen without holding an artifact in their hands, but I have not seen any concrete evidence of this. On the contrary, the narrow screen-window on a document usually means much less awareness of transitions and overall guidance between sections. I would love to see a way to get fast draft-quality printouts on recycled paper, but so far we are forced to do more screen editing than I would like. Changing to smaller fonts can increase the number of sentences visible per screenful, but this can concomitantly reduce overall readability--a poor trade-off.

As a bridge to getting students in the habit of radically rearranging their texts, I sometimes use an old-fashioned method: I prepare for class by taking a group of sentences from a student paragraph, numbering them, and arranging them on a page with space in between. Then I make twenty-odd copies of this page, and use the paper cutter to create twenty-odd sets of slips of paper, each with a sentence. Doing this for groups of three students can reduce your busy-work, and furnish the inspiring spectacle of students lobbying fervently for one order over another.

Armed with several rolls of scotch tape, I have my class physically rearrange the slips into more effective ordering schemes, with transitions and editing factored in. I sometimes force them to manipulate the strips for ten minutes and only then make the sentences available on the file server to save re-tying. Alas, the classrooms (labs) are not laid out for this kind of work (one student's mouse pad is another one's draft), a point which is difficult to communicate to non-teachers. After a given amount of time, they then cut-and-paste their electronic document version, and send the results to a Daedalus session or the server or the projector for others to appreciate. Such work has an added benefit, showing that different people "see" the task and the solutions in different ways, and that different strategies are perfectly legitimate. [This activity is also discussed in the "Overhead Projection" section of this Guide.]

For experienced writers, the editing phase is where the computer really comes into its own, but a note of caution is in order. Ever since word processing burst into professional writers' consciousness in the early 1980's, composition teachers were tempted to make a mistaken extension: a word processor made a good writer into a better writer, but word processing did not make bad writers into good writers. Word processing created more productive bad writers with neater margins and niftier fonts, and spell checkers changed the kinds of errors that plagued their papers.

The ability to manipulate text and make sophisticated editing changes without retyping or re-justifying is a huge advantage, but without real training in the techniques, our students maintain unproductive and restrictive editing patterns. Fortunately, the computer classroom is a good place to teach our students to craft prose, to recognize strong and weak constructions, cultivate good editing habits, guide their readers with strong paragraphing and topic pointers.

To my mind, this is one of the greatest challenges faced by experienced writers in teaching this difficult cognitive task: writing instructors (most of whom, we hope, are accomplished writers) get blinded by their own verbal agility, and fail to see the difficulty of what they take for granted. They can easily fall into the athletic-coach trap of "just do it," without taking responsibility for teaching critical-thinking skills and overcoming years of resistance and frustration. As a tool for inexperienced writers, the keyboard and mouse can be a restriction and not a liberation: not only does the task demand high-level thinking skills, but the physical manipulation of text requires some non-intuitive and sometimes frustrating challenges to hand-eye coordination. Hence the importance of including some specific editing and text-manipulation instruction in this next phase of the process.

As teachers in conventional classrooms have known for years, the Richard Lanham "Revising Prose" videotape is a good place to start, with its "Paramedic Method" for stripping away wasteful and wordy constructions. Resource files from the 1988 version of this Guide can help, but many more are accessible from on-line sources being compiled and annotated this year for the Web version. Closer to home, every good teacher has a toolbox full of suitable techniques, most with easy adaptations to the computer environment, and you are encouraged to share these resources with the writer and editor of this Guide.

Some aspects of sentence-level revision exercises are discussed elsewhere in this manual, but using the student's own writing as the raw material is a particular challenge. Whenever I can, I try to be specific without being too prescriptive. Sometimes just calling attention to weak verb forms is enough to make students revise for stronger constructions; other times I have them highlight verbal noun forms in bold, and try to revise for stronger subject-agent constructions using the verb hidden inside the noun.

To encourage editing skills and take some of the cognitive load off the student, I sometimes offer model sentence patterns for students to adapt to their own work in progress. For example, I need to teach the use of clauses of concession in legal writing class. After posting a subordinated sentence on the whiteboard or on the screen, such as "Although the lifeguard warned the boys about the rules of the high dive, they continued to jump dangerously close to the pool edge," I tell them to adapt such a pattern to the case they are writing about. Such techniques work well for teaching parallel construction patterns as well: "Three types of human interference are leading to amphibian die-offs: x, y and z." With the latter example, the x, y, and z elements can be words, phrases or clauses, and students should be encouraged to try out several different patterns and choose the best one for the task.

Jayne Walker's style analysis exercises also work well here, making students more aware of repeated patterns or verbal crutches that dog their prose. Daedalus Respond series can also be effective in getting students to scrutinize their writing style as well as their content, although I have found that some pruning is necessary. As we develop customized tools and add them to the storehouse of readily accessible resources, we will shorten the learning curve for instructors, and avail ourselves of specialized tools for different kinds of writing.

One particular technical point that is frequently overlooked at this phase of the process is the strain that such computer-screen editing creates on the writer's memory. When working with pen and paper, an editor can usually see the original version in amongst the cross-outs, whereas the "delete" key completely effaces the original. To revise heavily one sometimes obliterates the original sentence, and this can be disconcerting even to the most experienced writers (especially sleep-deprived ones).

Many of the new word processing packages offer special formatting options like redlining and strike-through, but these can become clunky and bulky when used at the level that I encourage my students to operate. Jared Haynes' contribution to the Web version will show how one instructor uses Word 6's redlining features in a Legal Writing course.

To alleviate this problem I have begun making temporary copies of draft paragraphs and sentences that I am working on, sometimes placing a copy in another file that I can switch back to if I end up losing my thread. With short passages, simply highlighting a sentence and placing a copy below the original can maintain hints of what was originally there; for most of my crunch-time editing, however, I still prefer the feel of paper draft, complete with insertions and deletions and cuttings and pastings. I've found that my students appreciate insights into the instructor's process, as long as I clarify that there is no one method that works for everyone.

Most of these techniques involve the use of the computer as a word processor, but word processing packages now often include tacked-on programs that purport to help students edit their writing. From what I have seen these electronic aids are dreadful. As I point out in the Projection and Demonstration section, the "grammar-checker" functions of most word processing packages have become increasingly appealing, despite their limitations. Microsoft Word's grammar checking (under the Tools menu) will flag passive constructions and an amazing assortment of other "problems" that aren't problems (for example, in the previous sentence it plaintively points out that "This sentence does not seem to contain a main clause," not recognizing the subject use of "functions"). I remain deeply skeptical of these "aids," and I can only speculate on their long-term effects.

Whether or not students print out a draft for final revision and polishing, I emphasize the need for careful reading of the final draft. Though having students read drafts aloud to each other can cause noise levels to get excessive, this can be a productive way to teach punctuation and style: the trouble usually is to make them aware of what punctuation they are adding or deleting on the fly! Doing this in groups of three or four, with each writer reading to the group, can proportionally reduce the number of students speaking at once.

Students have to be reminded that surface polishing cannot stop with the spell checker--although that's a useful place to start. I have noticed an increasing tendency for student writers to rely on the spell checker, without recognizing its limitations, and I am compiling a list of classically bizarre examples where, as I note in the margin, "The spell-checker is not your friend." Andy Jones introduced me to the term "malonym," describing these ill-considered offerings (there is no suggestion for "malonym," by the way).

A final note about surface appearance: rest assured that some of your students will seemingly expect you to be an expert on all sorts of things besides writing. In particular, format and surface appearance can take up huge amounts of energy and time, if you let them. Full-featured word processing packages are a nightmare of sub-menus and niceties that do not concern us, and represent an inexhaustible time-sink for seasoned professionals (just ask any staff person who has had to adjust to many styles or packages). Do not be tempted to delve very far into the nether regions of MS-Word's double-column formatting techniques, or into the Styles menus or what have you, even if asked.

Why do students obsess over this, and ask you during class time? Part of this stems from the psychology of the computer classroom: knowledge may be power, but so is the discovery of knowledge-limits; there seem to be students out there who take great pleasure in making you say "I don't know" or "Right now, that's not important."

Even when I teach technical writing or documentation classes I try to adhere strictly to my guns: I do very little with format, keeping everything as simple and straightforward as possible. The manuals are out there, as are the "Dummies" books or other software guides, and your job is not to do the leg work for your students. I cringe every time I hear about students working on web pages for a class project, and spending more time getting a fancy background pattern or image to load than they did on editing for content and readability!

My advice is to set limits early, and to concentrate on doing what you do well; the computer classroom should allow you to do things more effectively than you can in a conventional classroom, not less. This is one of the main reasons I have campaigned so ardently for stable teaching environments, even at the cost of not keeping up with upgrades: too often, workers waste time on a new program or feature that would be better spent on writing and thinking! (On the other hand, if Macintosh Operating System 8 truly is less crash prone than its minefield-like predecessors, then we will benefit in the short and long term.)