Factory output writing

When students are product focused, they are often short sided in terms of revision. I find that many of my students think believe that revision and editing are they same thing. Thus, they click spell check on their computer, change a there to their, and a too to two and call it a finished product. A factory output model. As a teacher I have to be extremely vigilant about assessing parts of the essay along the way in order to stress the importance of process. Is this what Shipka cautioned against “the Ways that [practitioners] overly prescriptive assignments . . . and perpetuate instead a mechanical fill-in-the-blanks or cookbook approach to composing” (9)?

The multimodal approach offers an alternative as it requires students to be more engaged with the process: “Rather, revision has become re-vision: A demand-ing process that involves both the potential and the willingness to reimagine the goals, contexts, and consequences associated with their work (16). Anecdotally I have noticed that I when I assign projects that are creative in nature, some students really slow down and focus on what they are creating. In this process I see students willingly to throw out previous drafts or ideas, something that rarely happens when they are writing an essay.

I think that I as the teacher need to work on figuring out a way / rubric that allows students to take responsibility for attending to product, operations/process/methodologies, resources / materials / technologies (12) so that they envision / re-envision the way in which they communicate.