Electronic Writing Groups

This document focuses on the writing skills of college students. The days of students sifting through piles of file cards, producing detailed outlines, and handwriting drafts have slipped into the distant past. Students write quickly and casually with the assistance of technology, and common sense dictates that technology needs to be used to teach them to write better. The faculty director of the writing program at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of this document, decided to apply technology to the goal of making writing instruction more cost-effective and proposed to design a new, technology-based model for teaching writing. From 1997 to 2002 a team of experienced graduate student instructors from several different departments worked with the author to create, test, and refine the course, leading up to a comprehensive evaluation during the 2001-2 academic year. Because acquiring writing skill takes time, common wisdom suggests that more extended exposure to writing instruction benefits students. Electronic delivery creates a unique opportunity to alter length of instruction without adding course units or additional time to the student's or instructor's load. Eliminating formal class meetings and focusing on shorter, more concentrated writing activities ensured that the class work felt lighter than a traditional course, making a half-credit per semester seem appropriate. Extending writing instruction over a full year had several clear benefits. The project was formally evaluated during the fifth year of the program, by surveying students along with their peers in traditional wring courses about their experiences, comparing the cost of electronic writing groups to the cost of conventional writing courses, and comparing the quality of the writing produced in each environment. The results of the study validated many of the choices. The evaluation revealed that students in the electronic writing groups learned as much and, in some cases, more about perparts in traditional comparison groups