Writing Using Technology

It is interesting to me to think of writers having the opportunity to draft written pieces using technology.  I can remember being in first grade in 1988 and getting to sit at a computer to publish a poem that I had planned, drafted, revised, edited, and published on paper.  I then was told I could publish my poem using the computer.  I sat down at a station that looked like this... This was the first time I had ever sat down at a computer.  I had no idea what to do.  The letters looked similar to mine that I had handwritten but not exactly.  I was not sure what to do.  I typed all through the computer time and recess.  I finally finished and the teacher hit print.  I looked at my paper and started to cry.  There was no space between my words!  It was supposed to do that for me! The teacher has closed my screen and not saved.  I was so embarrassed to show my mom my piece at parent teacher conferences.  I vowed then and there to learn how to use that machine that made my writing look cool, but could not figure out what I needed it to do.  The article, Email as Genre: A Beginning Writer Learns the Conventions, talked about a little girl that assumed that her grandma would know what she was talked about when she said, "I loved it."  I was that little girl!  I assumed that the computer would space for me and she assumed that Grandma would remember the specifics of her previous email to make sense of the reply.  

Letting students learn to draft thoughtful replies via email could definitely enhance a student's writing ability to respond with thoughts embedded throughout.  By typing your feelings you have to be explicit with what you mean to say.   Planning mentally a reply to an email requires thought on the student's part.  The actual drafting of the email requires a writer to write with detail and explicit wording to get points across.  In response to a question students need to be sure to address the question in its entirety so that the reply is complete.  These are all valuable skills that will help students be able to craft responses that address all points necessary in other types of writing as well.  Students can then be taught to reread and make proper revisions.  Grammar could be enhanced with spell check options in email and other grammar checks built in.  This would help catch sentence fragments and provide teaching opportunities for that aspect of grammatical  instruction. 

Another facet of students using email as a form of perfecting part of their writing craft is that once something has been typed it is permanent. Once words are typed, even before they are sent, they are available for retrieval.  This is an important teaching point for students.  They need to be careful what is typed.  A rule that I live by...If I would not want to see my words on the front page of the newspaper, then I should not type them.  An email can be powerful, but dangerous if misinterpreted.  Richard Capone has some good points when teaching how to draft an email in his article, Is Email A New Genre of Writing?