Preface

The use of personal computers in college classrooms (or special writing "labs") is commonplace. The use of computers in high school and college writing classes, despite the volume of literature on the subject of computers in the schools, has largely gone unquestioned. Computers began showing up en masse in colleges to help students with writing, but often these computers are there simply to demonstrate that the college is keeping up with technological advances. Students arrive at school with their own computers or having used computers in grade school, junior high, or high school, and they expect computers to be available to them for their college class work. And school administrators respond by providing them in libraries, dormitories, special writings centers, and, increasingly, in classrooms where writing is taught. Often, however, the computers are used either as sophisticated typewriters for individual student use or as instructional machines. This machine use of the computer is justified because it replaces the boring and punitive exercises that teachers once often filled class time with. But the replacement instructional exercises, usually dealing with punctuation and grammar, are perhaps not so boring but are equally as punitive. The justification for the computer as teaching machine is that class time is freed for more interesting and valuable aspects of writing; the machine does the drudge work. Too often, the use of the computer for drudge work is not questioned; the machine, after all, is a machine. Why not let it do what we teachers have failed to do?

This set of writing exercises challenges the use of the computer as a teaching machine. It is not the computer that does the drudge work, after all; it is the student. Writing is never drudgery. It is work, but never boring. The exercises show students how to use the computer the way writers use computers. We use the capabilities of the word processing programs to reduce, nearly to elimination, the inertia built into the old technology (pen and paper, typewriters with carbons, typewriters with correcting ribbons, etc.). We overcome the resistance to revision as well as use the capabilities of the computer to overcome the material resistance to thought that inheres in all recording media: the computer is the best approximation we have of a technology that mimes and makes material the thought process.

These writing exercises try to take advantage of both the opportunities given us by this technology: they encourage "free writing" (which is only free from the censoring function most encouraged by traditional writing instruction that places maximum emphasis on mistakes in punctuation and grammar) and they encourage revision (re-vision, seeing again based on the new knowledge revealed by re-writing).

These exercises can be done without the aid of the computer. They will, however, never be done with the enthusiasm they otherwise will provoke with the computer. I say "enthusiasm" based on my experience observing students make changes that they find pleasure in making. And I use the word "pleasure" carefully and without apology or explanation. The exercises explain and provide proof enough.

There are ten exercises; more could be provided. I have found that ten fit easily into a semester and that ten cover what I have found to be most important for first year college writing students. A high school might wish to provide more and different ones. They are not so difficult to devise, nor it is very difficult to enlarge these style exercises to include more emphasis on theme structure and principles of organizing larger papers—research and critical analysis.

And, finally, an explanation in lieu of an apology. These writing exercises are not a return to the teaching of grammar, although my students' lack of knowledge about any aspect of how writing works suggests that a return to diagramming sentences would be an improvement over how writing is now taught. I am no grammarian, I am a writer. And as a writer, I feel no need to defend an expectation that readers have a rudimentary knowledge of the vocabulary of sentence structure. Every discipline has its own vocabulary. And writing is no exception. But writing is so exceptional a discipline that it, more than any other, involves more discipline that many writing teachers seem to expect of their students.

Go to the Introduction

Go to the Introductory Note on Sentence Style

Go to Exercise One

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