Comment Free-for-All
Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is to expand the overall cooperativeness of the students in the class and to increase their familiarity with word-processing technology. It is also a good route to go to keep students focused on the draft that they are workshopping instead of allowing the class time to devolve into social hour. You might request that students use the computers in the class so that directions can be consistent across student-users as they move from one computer to the next.
Description: This activity is for classes being held in one of the computer writing classrooms. Students should have their drafts uploaded to a central space, such as Blackboard, so that they can access them in class from the classroom computers. Each opens up his/her draft on a workstation, and members rotate around the room as seats become available. They use the Word comment feature to make comments. While this can be done with any stage of draft, short drafts -- like "Shitty First Drafts" allow more comments to appear.
Suggested Time: 30 minutes
Procedure: Start by determining clear criteria for the workshop -- use the stage of writing, assignment sheet, and class designations for "strong writing" to guide you here -- you might make a list on the board so students don't overly focus on superficial elements like grammar/punctuation in an early draft. A text like Richard Straub's "Responding, Really Responding" might help with this. Then, with the drafts open, the instructor should show the students how to make comments in Word using the podium computer/projector. She should also explain how to change the name in the commenter-box so that students can make clear who is doing the commenting. As one student finishes, she can look around the room to see when someone else has finished, and they can switch (given that they haven’t already commented on the paper at the open station). This can go on indefinitely. This method is also useful because it gets a number of different perspectives on each student’s draft, making the workshop that much more valuable. When the session is over, the students return to their original stations and upload their drafts back to the central location for later viewing. The instructor can also go here to view the progress of the drafts and the productivity of the comments.