Word Processing

Today in class we explored off-line and on-line word processing, beginning by opening Microsoft Word and writing a story title and a first sentence (mine was "The Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" with first sentence "It was a dark and stormy morning."). Then we did round-robin writing with small groups to continue the story; each person inserting her own creative plot-moving sentence. After the story took on a life of its own, we turned to the "track changes" feature and edited our story. I am sure this exercise is currently being done in classrooms everywhere because it incorporates keyboarding skills, group collaboration, proofreading and editing, as well as creative writing. Students will love coming up with off-the-wall plots and juicy details in a story not all their own, and learn editing etiquette and strategies. Teachers will be able to monitor the story as well as introduced editing changes (and edit the edits if necessary). Compared with the old-fashioned way of producing several paper drafts with messy margin-scribbled edits, this method is clean, legible, and reflects amount of work put forth by each group member (accountability in black and white). I am familiar with reading marked-up manuscripts using this method in my freelance college textbook editing job, and have found the benefits of clean text highlighted with changes and authors chronicled in the margin pop-up tabs.

Next we worked as partners to create a story from a funny picture on National Geographic Kids site using Google Docs. The video of the neighborhood newspaper editor struggling to compile dozens of email attachment submissions with multiple versions all over the place was funny with all the paper cartoons but really illustrated how much cleaner it would be to have only one main document with multiple authors. My partner and I wrote a story called "Oh What a Watermelon" about a lady gulping mouthfuls from a 4-foot-long watermelon slice at a county fair watermelon eating contest. We enabled ourselves as collaborators and our instructor as viewer. I was often frustrated as I wrote a sentence that got trumped when my partner saved the accompanying photo (the program rejected my great sentence and I would have to start over). Because both authors were live at the same time we weren't as effective with our time in those instances. My partner used the comment feature to write notes to me about to-do items attached to the story so I got her messages instantly (a much better way than seeing them through email messages on another window). This is one step ahead of the ftp system of manuscripts and drafts we use in my editing job, but I see the benefits of both. The idea here is multiple users across distances can access the same document on the Web, making email attachment communication almost obsolete. I see how group projects can be much easier using this tool because all group members can access the latest draft at any time.

I admit that I am warming up to the electronic workflow in my editing, although I miss my dusty red pens and yellow sticky notes of the old way. Electronic documents on the Web has allowed me to continue working now that the local textbook composition company has been closed and has been replaced by project managers in Chennai, India. The world is different than it was 10 years ago and I am the one who has to adapt or move aside.