“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”
— Ernest Hemingway, letter, May 15, 1925 —

Some brief thoughts about the Mutligenre paper before I get into thoughts about revision...

The more I think about having students write a multigenre paper, the more I think that it will benefit the students, their writing skills and their enjoyment of the task. In considering (and reconsidering) my teaching philosophy, helping to foster a genuine enjoyment of reading has always been a top priority. Books have always been important to me, and I want to help students to see how and why books can play important roles in their lives.

When it comes to writing, on the other hand, I've had a different attitude. I want students to become better writers because these are important skills for life...but I haven't put a lot of thought into getting students to ENJOY writing. This is because, much of the time, writing still feels like work. Revision is not easy. So why not provide a more enjoyable platform (the MG paper) to learn the processes of writing and revision?

I've almost always been resistant to certain forms of revision. For example, I constantly revise as I write, as opposed to writing a complete draft and then going back to revise. Revising at the end of the draft usually seems too daunting. Students need to learn a variety of ways of doing things, so that they can determine what works best for them.

As I read Harper's article, I couldn't help but think about how the tools she described seem to have the potential to help almost all young writers. They are concrete and specific, without being constricting. Her ideas regarding "snapshots," "thoughtshots," and "exploding a moment," are better ways of saying things students have heard so many times before. Phrases written by a teacher such as, "more detail," "explain better," and "unclear," are vague. Harper instead provides tools that show students how break down the task and actually accomplish these things. In fact, this illustrates one of the biggest catch phrases in writing workshops: "show don't tell," since Harper doesn't just tell students what they need to fix, but she shows them how to do it.

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This site provides examples of how grammar operates in comic books. Using a selection of these examples could help to motivate some students to care about issues of grammar.

http://www.blambot.com/grammar.shtml

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This site could be used to show how poor grammar can affect people's perceptions of someone.

http://www.boldspark.com/entertainment/guide-proper-spelling-american-way

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Grammar humor:

http://monster-island.org/tinashumor/humor/writing.html