Revising/Drafting/Editing With Wikis

I divide students into groups of 3.* Each group is assigned one chapter from the RHE 306 first-year forum book, and each member of that group is responsible for composing a “research summary” (RS) of their assigned chapter. (RSs are one-page summaries of a source’s argument, and are ideally free from the summarizer’s opinion about that argument.) I have students compose their RSs as Word documents, then copy and paste them into the body of a wiki page. I also ask them to choose a distinct color for their wiki-page summaries. Below is a screenshot of a student’s RS. The student has turned it blue using the bottom-left button in the formatting toolbars above the text window.

Once each student's research summary (RS) is drafted and uploaded, I assign her/his RS to another group member to revise—for instance, if Jaime, Harold, and Terry are a group, Jaime is assigned to revise Terry’s RS, Harold is to revise Jaime’s, and Terry to revise Harold’s. I ask each student to make her/his revisions in a different color than the original draft of the RS.

Finally, I reassign the revised RS to the third group member, who is charged with editing (i.e., Terry drafts, Jaime revises Terry’s draft, and Harold edits the revised draft).

Since deletions obviously don’t have a color, I also have students record any removed phrases, words, punctuation, etc., at the bottom of the page.

The timing on this whole process can differ—you can assign it as homework and have each stage due on a different day, or you can have the revision and editing stages take place during a class meeting.

After the editing work is done, I have the original drafter look at her/his revised and edited RS. I then let the groups have internal discussions about how they made the choices they did at each stage: Why did Harold choose to quote different lines than Jaime during his drafting process? What led Terry to cut the first line of Harold’s second paragraph? If you want something tangible, you can have students write out their reflections: Where did their group members original drafts differ? What rhetorical choices did their group members make that led to these differences? What differences in opinion were revealed in what group members chose to revise about each other’s RSs, and did any revisions seem especially effective? Etc. Broadly speaking, I like these questions to get students thinking about writing—even summary—as a rhetorical process rather than a fill-in-the-blanks sort of task.

*If the total number of students in the class isn't divisible by three, I'll create groups of four, but each group member will only engage with two other group members' summaries as revisor/editor.