Writing workshops with Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word's reviewing functions enhance communication as students revise drafts of their writing projects.

By David Ansbacher

Handouts and examples

• A handout for students is available in Microsoft Word format, with instructions for the writing workshop.
• Examples of student work are also available in Microsoft Word format, with the teacher’s comments embedded.

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This article was originally published in 2000. Since then, Microsoft Word has undergone several upgrades, and your version may not work exactly as explained here. However, the reviewing and comment features remain essentially the same, and we still recommend these strategies.

For years, I’ve tinkered with different approaches to my writing workshop, which is the cornerstone of writing in my high school English classes. Tired of watching my hours of commenting on creative writing end up quickly slipped in the back of a notebook, never to be consulted, I sought a new approach. I wanted a way of working with students on their writing that would do a number of things:

• Encourage the kind of dialogue about writing that real writers have.
• Honor the time and thought that students put into their writing.
• Put the responsibility on students to focus on their strengths and weaknesses.
• Allow myself to elaborate in commenting on student writing — not just what I can cram in the margin or at the bottom of the page.
• Take the pressure off my messy handwriting — no more “I can’t read what you wrote here, Mr. A.”

I believe this technology-based approach to writing has met all these objectives and more. Your students will receive their papers back with thoughtful, typed comments, and you will have a more comfortable environment in which to respect the writing they present to you. It’s terrific!

About the technology

I created this approach to the writing workshop while teaching at Southeast Raleigh High School, a magnet school for science and technology. I was teaching a creative writing class that was lucky enough to meet once a day in the computer lab, where there was a computer for each student equipped with Microsoft Word. Students also had their own email account as well as a “home directory” where their files were stored on the school’s network.

I understand that most schools do not have this level of access to technology, and that is a shame. I’m going to present this system the way I was able to use it at my school — schools are getting more and more networked each year and hopefully your school will soon arrive at this stage. However, at the end, there are suggestions for how this program could be modified for other technology situations.

Setting up

Organization is considerably less cluttered when papers are turned in and returned over the network. As soon as I get my class list, I create a new folder called “Student Work” followed by the year.

Within this new folder, I create a folder for each child in my class, using her or his last name as the folder name. When a child sends me work, I simply click Save As to keep it in that child’s folder. This way, whenever a child loses a file, I always have a backup. If you’d like, you can also change the saved name to include the date, so that you always know when work was turned in.

You will want to set up your Microsoft Word for easy editing. Right now, Word probably has one or two "Toolbars" across the top. One may have your fonts, bolds, italics, and bullets, while the other might have buttons for opening files, cutting and pasting, and tables. Word had you in mind when they created another Toolbar called “Reviewing,” and you should call up that Toolbar before you get started.

To do that, open the View menu to Toolbars, and then select Reviewing. (In Windows, you can also right-click on any toolbar, then select Reviewing from the menu that appears.) If the toolbars start to look cluttered at the top of the screen, you can click and drag one or more of them to the side or bottom of the screen.

Marking errors

On the handout, you can see the instructions I gave to the kids about how we would approach this writing workshop. As a teacher, your end of the bargain is really quite simple once you get comfortable with highlighting errors and inserting comments.

First, I mark errors in grammar and spelling with the highlighter pen in Word. This lets the students see quickly where their errors are so that they can fix them.

How To highlight errors

1. Find the highlight button in your formatting toolbar — it is a picture of a diagonal highlighter with a horizontal colored line underneath. Choose a color by clicking on the arrow next to it. You’ll need to use something other than yellow, which is used for comments. (I use blue.) This color will be the default color until you say otherwise. Click on the highlighter. Your mouse cursor will change to an image of the highlighter. Select the word or phrase you want to highlight, and watch it change colors.
2. To remove a highlight, simply select the word and click the highlight button again.

There are a number of approaches you can use for errors. I usually told kids that it was up to them to figure out what was wrong with the blue highlighted words. They could ask other students or ask me, but I took off major points for errors that were highlighted in a draft and not fixed for the final draft. Again, you can save a copy of your editing and comments to see later whether they fixed the mistake or not.

Making comments

For longer comments, I use the Comment tool in Word. Like the highlighter, the Comment tool allows you to highlight text, but it also allows you to add hidden text — the comment — that will appear when you move your cursor over the highlighted text. The student can then see where your comments are and read them easily, but you won’t have to clutter up her or his work with more text.

How to insert comments

1. Place your cursor on the word or phrase on which you’d like to comment. Click on the yellow sticky note button that starts the Reviewing toolbar. (This can also be found by clicking on Insert and then Comment, but the Reviewing toolbar saves you a step.) The Comment screen will pop up at the bottom. In brackets will be your name or number as installed when the computer was set up, and then a comment number. Write your comment in the space beside that number. Your comment can be as long as you’d like it to be. To read the comment, simply float your cursor over the yellow highlight and your comment will appear beside the phrase you chose.
2. If you want to change or delete the comment, right-click on the yellow highlight and choose Edit Comment or Delete Comment. If you’re using a Macintosh, you’ll need to use the Reviewing toolbar: the button with the sticky note and pencil is Edit Comment, and the sticky note with the red X is Delete Comment. The Delete tool will only be available when you have just clicked in the highlighted text.

You can do a lot more than just enter comments on student papers. There is great potential for peer-editing with these tools, as students can just as easily comment on other students’ papers. Also, if you wanted to do more with color coding, you could use other highlight colors to signify different writing skills on which you’d like to focus — use a color to show how often a student starts a sentence with “I,” or to point out a repetitive sentence structure problem.

This also makes publishing student work so much easier. If you have copies of student stories and poems on your hard drive, it is only a few simple steps to publishing a book of student writing. You or an industrious student can easily format student writing into a common font, combine them into one document, and publish a book in your classroom. A published piece of work is the best motivator I’ve seen for improving student writing — kids love to see their writing in print.

Are there drawbacks? Certainly. The obvious one is that some teachers and kids may miss the handwritten aspect of it all, and kids who type poorly will not flourish. As someone who thinks much better at a keyboard than with a pen in my hand, I don’t miss this at all, but I know many good writers who are just the opposite, and we should respect those learning styles. I assure kids there is nothing wrong with writing by hand first and then transferring to the computer.

Assessment strategies

Assessing creative writing is always a challenge, and these tools can work well with any rubrics that you have found fit your teaching style. I don’t tell my kids that they must respond to my comments, but if you would like, you could base assessment on whether they make effective changes to areas on which you asked them to focus.

Another thing I have done is to have students submit a “Writer’s Plan” in which they propose a final product and a rubric by which it will be graded. Just as professional writers propose works to editors, young writers learn responsibility and get a sense of what they determine to be excellent work for the genre they aspire to emulate.

Modifications for varied technology situations

Most teachers don’t find themselves lucky enough to be able to teach a creative writing class in a lab every day where each kid has his or her own computer. Even so, many of these strategies can be adapted to make the most of your technology.

“We don’t have email.”

This entire process could work just as well with disks. Each student would simply have a disk that s/he would turn in instead of papers. You could save files on the disk and on your own hard drive and still reap the benefits of Microsoft Word.

“I only have three computers in my room.”

This is a perfect case for stations or learning centers. You could design a writing workshop with five different stations to and from which students would rotate through the course of a few days. I’ve done this before with a workshop that spanned a couple of weeks.

1. Word processing — actual time on the computer writing and editing
2. Peer-editing — talking with other students about their stories
3. “Writers to Look Up To” — a chance to read and respond to literature by other writers who could serve as models for student writing
4. Paper and Pen — time to outline, brainstorm, or write shorter pieces
5. Inspiration — a listening station and art gallery where students can see how other artists deal with themes they might write about.

With this kind of approach, you maximize the resources you have and also keep student attention by varying the sorts of activities. This certainly increases the planning time, but the payoff is wonderful, as you have a self-running system which puts student creativity at the center.