Annotated Table of Contents, Chapters 10-12

Chapter 10. Helping Students Prepare for Writing Assessments:
How can teachers prepare students for writing 25-minute
impromptu essays? Real writers let ideas incubate, write drafts
and revise and revise and revise. But state writing assessments
and, now, the new SAT requirement for a 25-minute writing
sample to begin in 2005, require practically spontaneous writing on assigned topics. Students are given little time to plan their writing and almost no time to revise. I will suggest methods for preparing students to :”write it right” the first time.

Chapter 11. The Computer and Writing Instruction: What problems did word processing help to solve in teaching writing? Computers and word processing changed the attitudes of students toward writing, a change that was the most significant I have seen in teaching English in the last thirty-five years. However, any change raises issues and I encountered a number of issues when I introduced word processing to teachers and students in the early 1890s. The most popular computers at that time were Radio Shack, Apple, IBM and Commodore.

Chapter 12. Computers, Writing Instruction and the Future: How will the computer change writing instruction in the future? I can foresee some changes in the writing program as the result of computer technology, but no essential changes in the nature of the writing process so long as words are the medium of expression. Of course, students can now add pictures to their compositions and can even turn them into multi-media presentations with sound and film. Although pictures, sound and film will be fun for the writer and maybe even helpful to the reader in fully grasping the writer’s message, they do not replace the need to create unified and coherent text, the difficult, essential skills of writing.