May/June 1999

OWLS: Who Can Benefit from Online Writing Labs?
By Nancy Walser

How can high schoolers improve their writing skills? While the answer is old-fashioned--practice, practice, practice--one method for promoting better writing is not.

In the 1980s, high schools responded to the need to give students more writing practice by establishing centers where writing directors, teachers, and peer tutors worked one-on-one with students on assignments. But with the coming of computers, writing centers are changing. Many now have their own web pages complete with links to grammar rules, writing tips, research guidelines, and sometimes an actual person to give students feedback on their work. Online Writing Labs, or OWLS, also give students important computer skills they will need in college, where the web is commonly used for coursework.

Thomas Bateman is one teacher who believes OWLS can change the way writing is learned and taught. Director of the writing center at Calvert Hall, a private high school in Towson, MD, Bateman also teaches two sections of senior English geared to students with low SAT scores. Through the writing center, he pairs each student with a tutor to help polish a weekly essay.

But this year Bateman tried something different. He offered students the chance to earn extra credit by submitting more essays by e-mail. He was hoping students would write an additional five essays per quarter. While most wrote only two, he is encouraged: "I can see they are getting more done than they would have. The more you write, the more you will learn. Students get more practice with writing with this kind of system."

Sharing drafts through OWLS, according to Bateman, also encourages teachers and tutors to focus on "higher order concerns" of content and argument. Correcting misspellings, for example, is much more time consuming on a computer than on paper. But giving feedback on substance is simple: comments are easy to insert by pressing the "cap lock" key and typing in the appropriate places. "Lower order concerns" like spelling can be addressed by cautioning students to use the spell check before turning in the final draft. "You don't harp on the writer about all the nitty gritty," Bateman says. "All that does is discourage writing."

Bateman always makes a duplicate of a student's essay on which to make comments, leaving the original intact for the student as a reference. This system also allows teachers to save their comments in a separate file so they can spot recurring problems.

Working through the web also enables teachers to peruse OWLS at other high schools and at universities and to participate in listservs featuring e-mail conversations with distant colleagues. "There is so much communicating, you can keep trying things to find things that work," Bateman notes.

OWLS don't eliminate the need for one-on-one conferences in the writing center, cautions Pamela Childers, writing center director at the McCallie School in Chattanooga, TN. High school students, she says, respond better to comments sent via e-mail after first working with a tutor face to face: "Secondary students are so needy. They run into writer's block frequently. There's a lot of body language and give-and-take that can't go on on-line. But you can get them started and then send them questions through e-mail later."

Childers estimates that about 80 to 90 percent of McCallie's 750 students use the school's OWL, now in its fourth year. In addition to posting links to resources on research, writing, and grammar, Childers has used the OWL to team-teach an interdisciplinary course called "Oceans: Past and Present." Students got their coursework and did research on-line, communicated through their own listserv, and produced the final project using Power Point software.

"There were students in Oceans who refused to check their e-mail, but by the end of the semester, I can assure you they all did," Childers reports. "And when they saw their semester projects on the web site, it became a reality to them." She adds, "Alumni come back and say, 'I'm so glad we had this, because when we went to college we had to get our syllabus and coursework off the computer and a lot of our classmates didn't know how to do it.'"

Besides tending to her students, Childers responds to requests from school secretaries for grammar rules, sending the answers out campus-wide by e-mail. Alums critique her OWL and ask her to read their resumes or cover letters. "When students leave here, they don't end the conversation," she says. "There's quite a family that develops."

Nancy Walser is an education writer and the author of Parent's Guide to Cambridge Public Schools.

For further information

Calvert Hall College High School Writing Center.

M. Harris. "Using Computers to Expand the Role of Writing Centers." In Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1998.

The McCallie School Writing Center.

The National Writing Centers Association.

Purdue University Online Writing Lab.