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New computer editor "Emma" makes writing more productive for English students at UGA
Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
Christy Desmet, 706/542-2224, cdesmet@uga.edu
Sep 17, 2003, 10:08
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ATHENS, Ga. – There’s a new teacher named Emma in the University of Georgia Department of English, and she doesn’t believe the dog ate your homework or that you had to spend the weekend in Panama with a sick uncle.
This Emma is an experimental software program that helps students – especially in their first year – to see exactly what they are doing wrong (and right) in expository writing. She’s called Emma, or more properly EMMA, because her full name is about as clunky as that of Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Electronic Markup and Management Application.
At the heart of EMMA is jEdit, an open-source editor written in the Java computer language that allows authors to mark-up their texts to highlight predetermined features. These marked-up texts can then be displayed in a variety of formats – for instance, to highlight topic sentences within an essay or to provide a separate list of topic sentences.
"We needed an editor that students could learn to use easily but one that would still be powerful enough to meet many needs," said Ron Balthazor of the English department and one of EMMA’s developers. "Our greatest challenge yet continues to be making the editing part of the process user-friendly and bulletproof."
Despite increasingly rigorous high school standards, many students arrive at college not knowing a thesis sentence from a gerund. They may be good writers but have relatively little experience with evaluating and revising their prose. With new computer applications abounding in education, a group of English faculty decided that it should have a program that easily, quickly and reliably pointed out students’ errors and revealed to them the structures of their essays, so that revision could be far more effective than with traditional word-processed papers and handwritten comments.
Christy Desmet, director of First-Year Composition, was one of the faculty members intrigued by the possibilities.
"The real genius of EMMA is that the program lets you see what you’re doing visually," said Desmet. "It marks everything from subject-verb disagreements to lapses in logic to useful strategies of argument."
The UGA English department has been using technology in composition classes since 1998, but the 2002-03 academic year was the first time EMMA began her full-time work with students and faculty. Ten classes used the program in the fall of 2002 and six last spring. This fall, about 15 freshman classes are using EMMA, as well as English majors who enjoy the program’s relentless attention to detail.
"EMMA has given me several advantages as a teacher, but most importantly it has allowed students to analyze their writing and the writing of their peers in a more immediate fashion," said graduate student Bob Cummings. "As a teacher, I can design a lesson plan on EMMA to focus writing analysis on any level, from sentence-level grammar to universal themes, and the resulting student insights are much more immediate. EMMA also allows students to quickly size up the writing of the entire class – something that simply wasn't possible using traditional print methods."
Another graduate student, Angela Mitchell, echoed Cummings’s comments.
"The students were, in general, excited by the variety of display options, and many mentioned how the different displays revealed previously unnoticed aspects of their essays to them, such as too many weak verbs or the variety of transitional phrases," she said. "In both courses, I had my students focus on larger rhetorical issues as well. The display options were also very useful in group work and class discussions because we could easily display through a projector the different EMMA displays."
Mitchell, in fact, was so taken with EMMA’s utility that she is also writing a chapter of her dissertation on it and on a human subject observation study she conducted with Desmet last year.
"What’s really crucial is the multiformat aspect of EMMA," said Nelson Hilton, head of the English department. "It is labor-intensive on the front end, but when you learn how to use it, EMMA goes far beyond bells and whistles."
Balthazor, Desmet, Hilton and others formed a working group a couple of years ago to find better ways to use computers in marking student papers. After what Balthazor admits were some "fumbles and mistakes," the group chose jEdit, which contains a plug-in for the use of XML, the specific "dialect" in which EMMA is written.
"The program helps in many ways, but the primary way it helped me was from a visual standpoint," said Bonnie Sillay, a senior from Atlanta. "By highlighting certain parts of my paper with different colors, my paper was divided into easily seen parts. This made it so much easier to see and truly understand the structure of my paper, which made the weaknesses of my paper easy to identify and correct."
Oddly, the team itself had little expertise in creating a computer teacher like EMMA, but it took advantage of a rich and growing environment in humanities computing on campus. What the professors did know – from years of teaching – was what students needed and what would work pedagogically.
A list of errors EMMA could be programmed to find is almost endless. In that sense, it is far more powerful than traditional grammar-checkers in word-processing programs. Still, it hardly removes the human teacher from the classroom.
"We were very concerned that it not be a technological babysitter," said Desmet. "We’re not interested in removing teachers from the equation."
Hilton said interest in EMMA by students and faculty members both inside and outside the department has been rewarding for the development team.
"We hope it’s an ‘if-you-build-it-they-will-come’ kind of thing," he said.
One of the best aspects of EMMA is that the editing process is done in "real time" so instructors and students can review the work as it is completed or students can actually correct errors as they go.
"As English scholars, we are daily interested in the formal aspects of texts," said Balthazor. "We see the ‘markup,’ as it were, of Thoreau or Blake or Shakespeare. As teachers of composition, we recognize the power of the form in the sentence and look for new ways to offer that power to our students. We have only begun to see what EMMA can do in the classroom, the journal or the book."
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