Will's+thoughts+about+Composition

I agree with Ray's definition of the two kinds of writing, especially with her point that composition is not properly instructed in most classrooms. It takes so much effort to understand what goes into writing a decent piece of composition. Most of the process is left up to the writer, in his or her own home. The teachers I had did a fine job of teaching grammar, structure and vocabulary, but the process of writing and revising was certainly overlooked. While I think that this really needs more focus, and that workshops should be a much larger part of language arts education, I also agree with Yancey that 21st Century has altered the way that revision takes place. Workshops can be expanded and integrated with discussion boards and social networking. Students can have much broader and more concurrent conversations with each other in the information age. However, I also think that writing should be considered separate from media. Images and more interactive media are useful, but I think they use skills more similar to reading than composing to produce and integrate. Students need to learn to make their writing powerful enough to stand without additional media, and that is certainly a challenging task. The articles convince me that language arts classes must have dedicated workshop days in order to accomplish writing goals.