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- Writing is a recursive process which involves prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.
- Students adept at keyboarding and/or handwriting begin with drafting, then they revise, and finally they edit.
- Students with text entry difficulties edit as they draft, and then revise.
- Prewriting allows students to plan and prepare for composing.
- Three different types of prewriting are:
- invention strategies,
- refinement strategies, and
- organization strategies.
- Refinement strategies include peer discussion and individual rehearsal.
- Organization strategies include storyboards, webs and diagrams, and outlines.
- A range of software including "ParaMind," "Brainstorm," "KidWorks2," "Inspiration," and "Word Web," facilitate the prewriting process.
- Drafting involves a host of skills including the ability to transform ideas into words, writing, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, spacing, indention, and sentence structure.
- Students who know keyboarding and experience difficulty in producing legible writing, prefer to start composing on a word processor.
- Students with knowledge of word processors fare better during the composing process than students with little experience in using word processors.
- In general, there are no significant differences in quality of student compositions written with a word processor and student compositions written by hand.
- Word processors help students increase both the speed and neatness of their writing.
- Revision involves changing text during the writing process by identifying discrepancies between intended and actual text.
- Students have revision difficulty when they do not clearly establish their intentions for the text. As a result they fail to detect, diagnose, or make appropriate changes in their text.
- Newer versions of word processors allow students and teachers to track changes made during the revision process.
- Distancing and neatness effects can have a negative impact on the types and the quantity of revisions made by students.
- Online and peer revision may be used to supplement revision capabilities of word processors.
- Editing focuses on specific issues such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
- Spell and grammar checkers can facilitate the editing process.
- Three problems exist with spell checkers:
- they flag proper nouns as misspelled words;
- they may not flag misspelled words that happen to be other, correctly spelled words;
- they may not have a suggestion for a misspelled word.
- Software programs such as "Co:Writer," "My Words," and "Write this Way" allow teachers and students to create individualized lists of commonly misspelled words.
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