It’s difficult to imagine the classrooms that inspired these articles, not only because I embraced technology from an early age (considering my now-advanced age, anyway), but because I never experienced a class like this, either. By the time I was in a class that leaned heavily on computers, and in a school with the money to do so, most students were past these challenges, and instructors, too. So what I fix on instead is Christine Hult’s description of the “inexperienced” writer versus a more professional writer, and the differences in processed described. In this, it seems, little has changed for student writers, who too often see “revision” as a mere rewording exercise.

This is something I spend a lot of time working on in my classes, and yet it remains one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced, even with trying multiple methods (some similar to those discussed here; Moran’s, for example, looks different today but similar exercises are possible with content management systems like blogs and Blackboard, or with collaborative apps). In creative writing classes past, we tried multiple methods for getting ourselves out of this, too, down to rewriting drafts by hand, from scratch (looking at the pre-typed manuscript was cheating!), and in the classrooms today, I work through all manner of exercises and prewrites and look for other ways to help students develop their own processes, the ideas that work best for them, and yet so often, they struggle to actually revise their thoughts and connections. I don’t know how I feel about the relation between screens and thinking in pieces, since we’re also likely to look at units of writing in pages, but something certainly causes students to think more often than not that each paragraph is a discrete unit, and that proofreading is the sum of editing, and it’s a trend that continues.