It is generally accepted that teaching writing should be conducted in stages following a more or less established set of phases students have to perform in the process of writing. These phases include: pre-writing, writing, revising, editing and publishing. As I have been analysing students' writing for quite some time and from various perspectives, I have come to the conclusion that my students struggle and fail at any of these stages of writing due to two main reasons:
1. They do not now how to start and
2. Once they start, they get lost.
Now, I know that this is not a scientific conclusion. Neither do I mean to propose that this conclusion is the result of some elaborate academic research. Even if it were, such elaboration would not fit the scope and purpose of this blog and should be sought elsewhere. What I want to say is that I have tried to resolve this issue with my students by means of collaborative writing for academic purposes and lately I started implementing various solutions in a computer-assisted environment.
Before getting to the computer-assisted solutions, I would like to describe some preliminary step I undertake with my third-year Legal English students. The genre of academic writing my students have to survive in order to make it to the final exam is the essay. In fact, they have to produce an essay on a topic from the corpus of issues we cover during the third semester of our Legal English course and that turns out to be quite a challenge. In order to help them, I apply some basic steps I refer to as collaborative brainstorming and these are as follows:
1. I randomly choose an object from the classroom for each student. The objects are then defined as the titles of their practice essays, such as Chair, Desk, Mug, Board, Marker, etc. Alternatively, students can be given concepts, phenomena or issues instead of objects, such as Rain, Patriotism, Fashion, Death penalty, etc. It all depends on how advanced you believe your students are.
2. I then ask them to think about the first question that comes to their mind about the object they have been assigned. Questions they come up with usually include:
- What is a/ an (the respective object)?
- What is a/ an (the respective object) used for?
- What is a/ an (the respective object) made of?
- How is the (respective object) used?
- Why would I use the (respective object)?
- What is the purpose of the (respective object)?
- Who can benefit from the (respective object)?
- etc.
I usually open a word document on the computer on my desk and type out the questions as they mention them. Since the projector is on, they can follow my typing on the wall.
3. Out of the pool of questions, we choose the most general one. Most of them agree that this would be:
What is a/ an (the respective object)?
I then explain that the answer to this first question would practically be their general statement/ topic sentence/ thesis statement announcing what their essay is going to be about. As I am a product of the old school, I still refer to the introductory sentence as a general statement.
4. They are then expected to write an answer to that question. I advise them to mention at least two different points in their answer because those two points will be elaborated in two separate paragraphs. In other words, the two points will be their arguments to support their general statement. For instance:
What is a chair?
A chair is a piece of furniture which is used to sit on.
5. In the next step we then put the questions in an order they believe makes sense. I tell them that some of the questions might not apply to their respective object and they might not use it at all.
6. Then they have to do some individual work as they are expected to write the answers to each of the questions in the order we have agreed on but apply them to the respective object they have been assigned to. As I type the order in my word document, they can check the order and make sure they have not made a mistake.
6. For their homework they then have to choose a topic from our Legal English coursebook and apply the same procedure. However, they have to use the Internet, search and use resources found online and try to put together a draft. After I give my OK to the draft, they can then start writing.
Unfortunately, most students do not understand that a draft version could actually be just a list of prompts or ideas. In other words, it need not be an essay right away. However, students are impatient and most of them actually submit a complete essay believing (hoping) they got it right. I can only imagine their frustration when I return their 'draft' after I have fully exhausted the 'track changes' tool!
That is why students can be encouraged to do some collaborative writing online. A nice tool I believe makes sense is TitanPad.
Another tool I would recommend here is Inklewriter.
Just like the ThinkPad, Inklewriter is easy to use, it is interactive and it can easily be implemented for the purpose of collaborative writing.
Unfortunately, getting started is not the only problem. Not getting lost can be a far greater issue. What I also teach my students when we start writing essays is the magic of key words. More importantly, I tell them that the key words referring to their respective essay topic have more than one role:
1. They will most certainly appear in the title.
2. They will most certainly have to appear in the general statement/ topic sentence/ thesis statement of their essay.
3. They will most certainly have to appear in the main body of their essay.
And last but not least,
4. They will be the search criteria for their research of resources once they start searching for them. In other words, they will type the key words into their browser.
In order to illustrate the magic of key words, I make a drawing on the board which is meant to illustrate the final lay-out of an essay of approximately 350 - 500 words. I actually draw a sheet of paper on the board and divide it into sections for them representing the title, the general statement, the two separate arguments and the conclusion. We then brainstorm the labels of the sections and try to allocate the questions we had previously brainstormed to the respective sections. Once we have completed this visual illustration, it is easy to indicate what coherence and cohesion are about as they sections follow a logical order and the content based on the questions is now related to the order.
I also advise them to underline the key words in their title and make sure they can find them in the body of their essay once they are done with their draft and then again when they are done with he final version. Of course, I also instruct them to make a list of possible synonyms so as to avoid the excessive repetition of one and the same vocabulary.
Further, I advise them to set as an objective of the editing and rewriting phase the possibility of erasing a lot of what they have written. Students most often do not even perform the editing and rewriting at all. Once they put the final full stop they say they are done. Students should be advised to let their writing mature for at least a few hours, maybe even a day or two. Unfortunately, students never start their assignments on time and they tend to perform last-minute tasks. Yet, they should be encouraged to put their writing away for at least an hour or two and then read it again. They all admit that they perform some serious alterations in their writing when and if they allow themselves some time away from their writing.
There are so many things that can be added to this post and I feel I have by far exceeded my initial purpose. I believe I will get back to this idea in some of my future posts but for the time being I think that I have managed to defend my point that computer-assisted collaborative writing makes sense!
