EMMA at Work in the Writing Classroom

During Fall semester of 2002, EMMA was implemented in ten writing classrooms, eight of them at the
First-year level. Teachers with more or less involvement in the development of the client and more or less
expertise with technology both incorporated EMMA into their pedagogy during two one-week stints in the
First-year Composition Computer Labs. This paper discusses specific pedagogical uses of EMMA at both the
macro- and microscopic level. Among the assignments, DTDs, and displays that will be demonstrated are:
following argumentative threads through the drafting process; establishing and evaluating ethos; analyzing
essay structure; and cultivating style with the “paramedic method.”
From the first semester’s pilot classes, we learned that EMMA and markup generally can be used to
identify structures and information at a variety of levels. Some exercises, such as the “paramedic method,”
may be especially congenial to EMMA’s capabilities because they build in the importance of visual
knowledge to writing and revision. EMMA may also function to some extent as an artificial memory system
for writers and readers of academic prose. Finally, we discovered that EMMA involves more, rather than less,
interaction between teachers and students, and among students and peers; not only does the visual separation
of writer from product in display provide the intellectual distance necessary for evaluating prose, but some
basic pedagogical problems (e.g., inability to identify basic parts of speech) also make themselves manifest.
In Spring 2002, the experiment will be repeated and, for selected classes, EMMA will be incorporated into the
entire semester’s curriculum instead of only two units