Whether you teach online, in a computer-networked classroom, or in a good old-fashioned classroom with a chalkboard and desks, chances are your students write most of their papers on a word processor. The drafts you see are printouts of works in progress. Unfortunately for many students, while printouts represent drafts, they sometimes represent the only copy of that particular draft. All too often, students work only in their original file, making changes as they need to without saving an electronic copy of earlier drafts.

While the printed record may be enough to satisfy day-to-day course requirements, it can be hard to recover lost or damaged printouts of papers after they’re crumpled, mutilated, and twisted in the nether reaches of backpacks, desk drawers, and crammed file cabinets. And any alternate thoughts, tangents, asides, or minor confusions that get cut or dropped during revision will need to be retyped--if they are found at all--should the writer wish to come back to them.

No matter where you teach or how much computer technology is present in your teaching, it's worth giving your student writers some advice on file naming and storage during the writing process. Teach them to keep both a print and digital collection of their drafts, notes, journals, and any peer review comments received electronically.

A simple and practical way to start: use lots of folders and lots of file names. Though this might sound like a recipe for clutter, if students start out organized, they can become pretty good at keeping track of things.

Folders

For each semester, students with their own computers should create folders with the name and location of the semester; students who rely on using public computers or a friend's machine, should use floppy disks (and should back those up). This folder is for long term use, assumig that students will be lifelong learners. While naming a folder UMASS SPRING 2001 COURSE WORK, might seem obvious at the time, in five, ten or twenty years when students look back through their digital records (and imagine what devices they'll be looking back with in 20 years), this level of detail will be a blessing. It's also handy in the short-term for students who transfer from one college to another.

Note the length of this sample folder name; including spaces, folder UMASS SPRING 2001 COURSE WORK is 29 characters. Time was when file and folder names could only be eight characters long in PC's. Many of us who began using computers when the eight-character file name was the limit are still in the habit of giving files short names. It's a habit worth breaking.

Next, for each course a student has, he or she should create a folder within the semester folder. (You can see where this is going.) For your course a student might have a folder called COLLEGE WRITING 101. And naturally, for each assignment, more folders; the COLLEGE WRITING 101 folder might include sub-folders for a Writing Journal, Reading Journal, Peer Reviews, Essay One, Essay Two, and so on.

Most of this is obvious when you think about it, a simple matter of organization based on the desktop/file cabinet metaphor that defines the computer space for most users. Naming multiple files as a way to keep track of drafts is a little trickier.

Files

Folder management is easier than file management because folders can be made in advance. For example, you can insert a folder icon into your syllabus next to assignment descriptions that, in this scheme, warrant a folder. But files, the documents that make up essays, can be endlessly evolved. When does a writer decide something's a draft? Part of this decision-making will be personal, based on the writer's creativity and internal sense of the piece, but part of it will be driven and shaped by your syllabus.

In most courses, students will only do multiple drafts and save files when told and helped to do so. In most writing classes, we teach students how to draft by setting a date for when a draft is due; at that date, the writer receives some kind of feedback intended to help them revise for a new draft. For most students, those dates define when a draft is done. But unless instructed otherwise, most writers will keep one file and will make changes, losing the record of their draft.

Therefore, they need to be told to use their word processor's Save As feature, and to make a copy of the file. So when the first draft is due, they might be working from a file called JANESMITHSUMMERVACATIONDRAFTONE, but on the due date, they should make a copy called JANESMITHSUMMERVACATIONDRAFTTWO in anticipation of the revisions to come. Again, teach students to name the files as specifically as possible.

Further, because students may be turning files into you on disk or as an email attachment, one of the best ways for them to name files is to use their own names in the file name. This will help you keep track of files and reduce the chance of one student's file overwriting another's.

Benefits

Keeping a folder with drafts provides an expandable record of the writing process that can include copies of peer reviews, notes, and scraps that were deleted from an essay but saved in new file use in a different essay.

Digital Portfolios

As you can imagine, with all the folders within a course folder, and all the drafts, and all the peer reviews, and all the other possible documents from your course (self-assessments, e-mail messages, reading journals, writing journals, and more), what students begin to create are digital collections of their work. With these, you can better teach students how to assess their own progress, show them connection between earlier writing and later writing, or give them the groundwork for a WWW portfolio that will help them in future courses and job searches.