EMMA's Development: From Software to Students

Although the scope of the EngComp Markup project ranges beyond the First-year Writing Program and even
beyond the English Department’s teaching mission, one central feature of that project is the development of
EMMA for writing classes at all levels, but especially at the first-year level. EMMA proposes to revise the
way in which students write, edit, and submit compositions for review, as well as the way in which instructors
and peers can respond by using markup technology to enable web-based collection, modification, distribution,
and archiving of student work. EMMA’s customized editing-software provides for instructor-specified DTDs
to be used for particular assignments. It also provides a means of ensuring the correct identification and
up-load of marked-up compositions back into the system archive, which manages peer review, instructor
comments, portfolio creation, assessment, and access permissions. XML markup has particular utility for the teaching of writing because it allows text to be identified
and “carved up” in ways that are customized for content, structure, audience, and rhetorical purpose. More
specifically, as a meta-markup language, XML allows document authors to encode data in discipline-specific
terminology; to describe specific types of document (e.g., an academic essay); and to tailor a document type
to a specific audience (e.g., English scholars or biologists). Furthermore, XML provides descriptively rich
information content, stresses the separation of data content from data presentation, describes document
content structure and semantic relationships rather than format, and makes information accessible and
reusable.
This paper chronicles the intellectual development of EMMA as an idea, and particularly the
evolution of the concept of a composition DTD and then multiple DTDs. In Spring semester of 2002, a group
of faculty and instructors met to construct what we thought would be an inclusive DTD for First-year writing
texts. This “mega-DTD” contained nineteen elements, which in the end proved unwieldy and produced a
cluttered display. At the end of this phase of the project, the group came to three conclusions: first, from a
design perspective, by necessity the project would follow a “spiral development model,” in which
development is incremental and cycled through stages of analysis, design, development, and testing; second,
the writing program would benefit most from multiple DTDs, customized to fit individual instructors’
assignments and pedagogy and, in time, organized into a staged and sequenced writing curriculum; and third,
that the goals of a writing program demanded “loose” or California DTD construction. In the first
demonstration of EMMA with a group of volunteer English majors, we began to troubleshoot technical
problems and refined our sense of timing and focus. In this phase of EMMA's development, students could
work with about five tags and two paragraphs per hour to hour-and-a-half session.