http://condor.depaul.edu/~sslatte1/
http://textualcoordination.blogspot.com/
sslatte1 at depaul dot edu

Download this presentation as a PowerPoint or Quicktime movie with voiceover below.

http://computersandwriting.org/
Texas Tech host site
TTU MOO

Writing on the Computer: Craft or Knack?

5.7M Quicktime Movie
(slattery_CWO_2006.mov)

1.5M PowerPoint Slides
(slattery_CWO_2006.ppt)

Argument:

Richard Young (1980) summarizes classical distinctions between purposeful strategy (craft) or mere habit (knack), calling craft “the knowledge necessary for producing preconceived results by conscious, directed action” and knack “habit acquired through repeated experience” (p.56). Such a distinction is important to teachers of writing. Writing in isolation, students develop habits (some good, some bad) and are not very reflective about (and therefore not actively controlling) their composing processes. Such students often fall prey to the immediate local conditions (material and rhetorical) of their writing.

Historically, the teaching of writing has focused on writers composing alone and eschewed “teaching particular technologies” – an attitude that fosters writing as habituated knack and fails to prepare students for the collaborative, distributed, technologically mediated activity of modern workplace writing. Though we have just begun to study such techniques, we know enough to begin changing our pedagogy. This presentation explores how we can help students develop techniques for writing in such environments -- to develop a craft of mediated writing.

Suggestions:

• Reveal your composing processes to your students
• Consider including student-led technology workshops (an excellent “student presentation” task!)
• Use the computer classroom as a place to:
  • learn and play with writing technologies collaboratively
  • share strategies and teach one another techniques
  • allow occasional eXtreme writing (have students co-author on one computer, concept borrowed from eXtreme programming)

Questions:

• How do we balance teaching writing as both a rhetorical act and a mediated process? (And how can we highlight the interplay between these aspects of writing?)
• How do we keep our classes from becoming “mere” technology training?
• How can we best identify and teach techniques of mediated writing?
• What do you do along these lines in your classes?