With the aim to build a foundation for the study of using technology to help students with their writing and proofreading skills, several applicable areas of research will be surveyed. The research will focus on the following topics: the significance of improving writing skills, proofreading, and writing across the curriculum.
Significance of Improving Writing Skills Writing skills are important in our day to day lives, they are a vital part of literacy; for a student to be involved in a literate society in the coming years, they will need to be capable writers as well as readers. By the year 2020, research estimates that students will need powerful literacy skills in order to participate fully in colleges, society, or in their workplace …show more content…
Writing is restricted to a few papers in English classes, and every other class, writing is limited to worksheets and short answer tests (Dean-Rumsey, 1998). How are students supposed to develop the needed skills if they are not actually writing in school? This has changed to some degree with the implementation of the Common Core, but there are still classes that do not encourage or assign written …show more content…
When writing is only taking place in one or two subjects, it has been shown that students’ writing skills do not improve (Anson, 1993). Writing Across the Curriculum supporters have a strong belief that “teachers of all disciplines need to include writing and editing as part of their course content, which will then improve subject-area learning and improve overall writing skills” (Dean-Rumsey, 1998). The term “writing to learn” (WTL) can be used interchangeably with “writing across the curriculum” (Dean-Rumsey, 1998). It seems that students who use writing as a way of learning often produce better written products than students who write because they were assigned to. “Writing across the curriculums aims to improve the quality of writing, while writing to learn focuses on better thinking and learning” (Gere, 1985). Writing to learn allows the student to take ownership of their ideas, and they are more involved in the process, which causes the quality of the final assignments to increase (Gere,
Significance of Improving Writing Skills Writing skills are important in our day to day lives, they are a vital part of literacy; for a student to be involved in a literate society in the coming years, they will need to be capable writers as well as readers. By the year 2020, research estimates that students will need powerful literacy skills in order to participate fully in colleges, society, or in their workplace …show more content…
Writing is restricted to a few papers in English classes, and every other class, writing is limited to worksheets and short answer tests (Dean-Rumsey, 1998). How are students supposed to develop the needed skills if they are not actually writing in school? This has changed to some degree with the implementation of the Common Core, but there are still classes that do not encourage or assign written …show more content…
When writing is only taking place in one or two subjects, it has been shown that students’ writing skills do not improve (Anson, 1993). Writing Across the Curriculum supporters have a strong belief that “teachers of all disciplines need to include writing and editing as part of their course content, which will then improve subject-area learning and improve overall writing skills” (Dean-Rumsey, 1998). The term “writing to learn” (WTL) can be used interchangeably with “writing across the curriculum” (Dean-Rumsey, 1998). It seems that students who use writing as a way of learning often produce better written products than students who write because they were assigned to. “Writing across the curriculums aims to improve the quality of writing, while writing to learn focuses on better thinking and learning” (Gere, 1985). Writing to learn allows the student to take ownership of their ideas, and they are more involved in the process, which causes the quality of the final assignments to increase (Gere,