Post 242: Why Publishing papers encourages student writing

Post 242: Why Publishing Papers Encourages Student Writing

Publishing student papers to a class website or creating a class book motivates students to write. When students work together and choose the best papers to put into a class book, this gives students an audience and a purpose to write.

Publishing writing to be read by a known audience, for example, in a classroom newspaper increases student engagement and motivates students to engage in revision needed to enhance the clarity of their writing. (Alber, 1999)

The possible audience could be their friends or family. When the class book is finished, they have a souvenir of that writing class. They have the pride of showing off their writing and showing off the writing of their classmates. Friends and family praise their writing workmanship and also want to take the next writing class.

Creating a website also teaches students digital literacy and website design skills they can  use in the workplace. It also teaches students about web content writing which involves a different set of skills then writing on paper (multiliteracies--the idea that each writing genre has a different structure, skills set and code for students to learn).

Multimedia composing programs are efficient in teaching writing to children. (Smagorinsky,87

When students know that their family will be looking at their work, they put more care into revising their work and they put more care into producing more creative writing than if they were just writing to fulfill an assignment or doing a boring writing workbook exercise.

The best writers are those who write for an audience and for a purpose and publishing class papers on a website or in a class book achieves both purposes.

For an online class, you can still have students create collaborative projects such as round robin stories where the teacher posts a writing prompt, then each successive student posts a continuation of that story, poem or play.

In my Introduction to Literature class, students write together in the forums, a complete class story, a complete class poem and a complete class play that is published in the forums.  Students love the creativity of the activity and it allows students to work together on a class project. Students also learn teamwork and collaboration skills they can use for the workplace.