Applied Word Processing: Notes on Authority, Responsibility, and Revision in a Workshop Model.

The popularity of word processing in the teaching of writing offers an opportunity to reinvent the workshop classroom model in the context of the new technology. The combination of lecture and discussion, of reading assignments and writing assignments allocated to two or three weekly meetings, has been the legacy of the days when composition was indistinguishable from introductory literature, or stylistics, or some other subject-matter course. But inasmuch as composition is a skill requiring more practice than anything else, it is best taught according to a workshop model, which allocates time for writing and revising, for brainstorming, freewriting, and rehearsing, for exchanging drafts and evaluating the audience, for consulting and polishing-in short, for active participation by all students in the writing process itself. Moreover, when writers perform such activities in a room full of computers, rather than in solitary confinement, they form a community in which their work becomes a public act. This community of writers provides a nearly ideal setting for collaborative learning, enabling freshman composition courses to liberate students from the idea that what they write is for teachers to evaluate. Writing for various purposes and audiences in the future will demand of them keen independent judgment-a skill that can be practiced through collaborative efforts such as group brainstorming, peer evaluation, and the agony of being misunderstood even by peers; much professional writing is altogether collaborative. In the word-processing classroom and laboratory everyone's work is, so to speak, on display electronically or in print, inviting the contributions of others and requiring the author to not only revise but to judge and revise. All of this reinforces the idea that writing is a social activity rather than fulfillment of a bizarre requirement in basic literacy. Even more reinforcement comes if faculty members use the same equipment and can be observed going through the same struggles with thought and language. A room full of word-processing computers not only brings writers together,