Because Digital Writing Matters

How to apply digital writing skills effectively in the classroom, from the prestigious National Writing Project As many teachers know, students may be adept at text messaging and communicating online but do not know how to craft a basic essay. In the classroom, students are increasingly required to create web-based or multi-media productions that also include writing. Since writing in and for the online realm often defies standard writing conventions, this book defines digital writing and examines how best to integrate new technologies into writing instruction. Shows how to integrate new technologies into classroom lessons Addresses the proliferation of writing in the digital age Offers a guide for improving students' online writing skills The book is an important manual for understanding this new frontier of writing for teachers, school leaders, university faculty, and teacher educators.

Where others have talked about new technologies and how they change writing, Troy Hicks shows how to use new technologies to enhance writing instruction. Chapters are organized around the familiar principles of the writing workshop: student choice, active revision, craft, publication beyond the classroom, and assessment of product and process. You'll learn to expand and improve your teaching by smartly incorporating new technologies like wikis, blogs, and other forms of multimedia. Throughout, you'll find reference to resources readily available to you and your class online.

This updated edition of the best-selling book Because Writing Matters reflects the most recent research and reports on the need for teaching writing, and it includes new sections on writing and English language learners, technology, and the writing process.

This handbook brings together scholars from around the globe who here contribute to our understanding of how digital rhetoric is changing the landscape of writing. Increasingly, all of us must navigate networks of information, compose not just with computers but an array of mobile devices, increase our technological literacy, and understand the changing dynamics of authoring, writing, reading, and publishing in a world of rich and complex texts. Given such changes, and given the diverse ways in which younger generations of college students are writing, communicating, and designing texts in multimediated, electronic environments, we need to consider how the very act of writing itself is undergoing potentially fundamental changes. These changes are being addressed increasingly by the emerging field of digital rhetoric, a field that attempts to understand the rhetorical possibilities and affordances of writing, broadly defined, in a wide array of digital environments. Of interest to both researchers and students, this volume provides insights about the fields of rhetoric, writing, composition, digital media, literature, and multimodal studies.

Drawing lessons from writers of all ages and writing across genres, a distinguished teacher and writer reveals the enduring importance of writing for our time In this new contribution to Yale University Press’s Why X Matters series, a distinguished writer and scholar tackles central questions of the discipline of writing. Drawing on his own experience with mentors such as John Updike, John Gardner, and James Baldwin, and in turn having taught such rising stars as Jesmyn Ward, Delbanco looks in particular at questions of influence and the contradictory, simultaneous impulses toward imitation and originality. Part memoir, part literary history, and part analysis, this unique text will resonate with students, writers, writing teachers, and bibliophiles.

This book shows how teachers, can orchestrate increased nonfiction writing in every classrooms and, by so doing, raise student achievement in all subject areas. Here you'll find strategies to help you use more nonfiction writing with students, no matter the subject.

In this book, Troy Hicks - a leader in the teaching of digital writing - collaborates with seven National Writing Project teacher consultants to provide a protocol for assessing students' digital writing. This collection highlights six case studies centered on evidence the authors have uncovered through teacher inquiry and structured conversations about students' digital writing. Beginning with a digital writing sample, each teacher offers an analysis of a student's work and a reflection on how collaborative assessment affected his or her teaching. Because the authors include teachers from kindergarten to college, this book provides opportunities for vertical discussions of digital writing development, as well as grade-level conversations about high-quality digital writing. The collection also includes an introduction and conclusion, written by Hicks, that provides context for the inquiry group's work and recommendations for assessment of digital writing.

Writing Matters Tabbed Make it your own! Writing Matters Tabbed unites research, reasoning, documentation, grammar, and style into a cohesive whole, helping students see the conventions of writing as a network of responsibilities writers have . . . . . . to other writers. Writing Matters Tabbed clarifies the responsibility writers have to one another, whether they are collaborating in online peer review or drawing on digital and print sources in a research project, to represent the ideas of other writers fairly and accurately, to give credit to those from whom they have borrowed words or ideas, and to consider and address alternative viewpoints. . . . to the audience. Writing Matters Tabbed stresses the importance of using conventions appropriate to the audience, to write clearly, and to provide readers with the information and interpretation they need to make sense of a topic. . . . to the topic. Writing Matters Tabbed emphasizes the writer’s responsibility to explore a topic thoroughly and creatively, to assess sources carefully, and to provide reliable information at a depth that does the topic justice. . . . to themselves. Writing Matters Tabbed encourages writers to take their writing seriously and to approach writing tasks as an opportunity to learn about a topic and to expand their scope as writers. Students are more likely to write well when they think of themselves as writers rather than as error makers. By explaining rules in the context of responsibility, Writing Matters Tabbed addresses composition students respectfully as mature and capable fellow participants in the research and writing process.