Poet Ponders the Digital

Use the best tool for the job. It's a simple saying, and one many writers ignore. Paper and pencil, while often my preferred tools for writing, have not been the best tools for writing for at least a century. Typewriters are better, if you are concerned with speed and legibility. Typewriters with correction tape gave us another reason to prefer the mechanical to graphite sticks and wood pulp. I remember my sense of awe when I saw the earliest word processors. These were typewriters with memory, and sometimes a disk drive. Not quite computers, but certainly something more than a manual typewriter, I wanted one… but never owned one. Instead, I upgraded from a blue Smith Corona manual typewriter to a brown Brother electric. Even after receiving an early home computer, a Commodore VIC-20, the typewriter was the best device for writing quickly. My first real computer, a Tandy 1000, included a simple suite called DeskMate. I used the text editor to write stories, saving the...

One of my favorite writing tools is Word Counter 2.1, from Supermagnus Software. http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/Word_Counter/ The price? Free. The value? To quote a popular credit card company, "Priceless." If you're like most of my students, you're asking yourself, "Doesn't every word processor include a word count function? What's the big deal?" Yes, most editing and word processing applications do count words, sentences, and paragraphs. However, I'm more interested in two features that are either incomplete or missing from word processors and layout applications: word frequency counts and readability analyses. Again, most applications provide at least the ability to create these reports, but none of them match the speed or ease of Word Counter. There are several reason I use Word Counter: Not every text editor I use provides real-time word counts; Word counts are curiously inaccurate within some applications; Macros for Word that ...

How do I respond to student writing using online technologies? I tend to make extensive use of Microsoft Word's "track changes" and "reviewing" modes. The real challenge for me as an instructor is to not make every edit for a student. My primary concern, and research seems to support this, is that students have been inculcated with the notion that you make the suggested corrections, no more or no less, and that is what constitutes "revising" a paper. Online, this habit becomes even easier... cut-and-paste or simply "accept change" and the revising is "done" in the view of many students. When I first started student teaching, in the late 1980s, I fell into the trap of making too many comments on papers. Now, I try to minimize how often I correct mistakes students need to discover. I also do not make as many suggestions as I did years ago. Online tools have made editing and leaving short comments much easier. For all the dang...

The thoughts for this week are in response to: In your blog: how might you digital note-taking tools (see links on the wiki) to have your students take notes/engage in prewriting activities? Create a digital map using Inspiration (use a free trial download: http://www.inspiration.com) about your potential final project topic; reflect on how you could use digital mapping for helping students exploring relationships between different topics/images. I have to admit that I need more time to experiment with Inspiration 8, as well as other tools, because I am fairly set in my own note taking ways. Until I gather my thoughts a bit more, I can at least explain my own habits and my personal views on software tools. Before I start, I'll make a pitch: If you use a Mac, the Omni Group makes some of the best organizational tools I have used. ( http://www.omnigroup.com/ ) I like the fact Omni applications do not “feel” like PC software ported to the Mac — these are OS X applications from to...