I suppose my question is about whatever word processors students typically use these days, and how the formatting copies over to Word. I’m currently requiring them to submit essays in DOCX format, with PDF as a poor second choice.
And I’m shocked by how many of these papers don’t use page breaks - they’ll just type return however many times it takes to get the next item onto the next page. Indents are a (very inconsistent) number of spaces. Hanging indents are often a mix of hard returns and tabs, but OK, Word does sometimes get weird with those. A non-zero number of students even submit double spaced essays
by typing in a hard return
at the end of every line
including the blank line to be double-spaced
although sometimes they’ll forget that blank line
, which I find unfathomable.
The “headers” and page numbers from that subset of students are amazing. They must put so much work into getting those in the right position. No wonder the proofreading is appalling - change one word and every header is suddenly in the wrong place.
This must be how they’ve been writing homework all year, but until the distance learning started, they were handing in paper and I didn’t see how the sausage got made.
So what gives? My operating assumption is that they haven’t clued in to word processing features available since decades before they were born, but am I being uncharitable? Are they really this bad at what I’d have thought are very basic computer skills? Is there something with moving files over from Google Docs or whatever that leads to this sort of formatting? Is this something from typing in Chinese? I move back and forth between OpenOffice and Word fairly often, and while I certainly encounter issues, they’re not these issues.
I ask my students to submit PDF files to ensure that no monkey business happens when I open the files. Then I can properly assess what they have produced without wondering if something happened when an MS Word file moved to a different computer or different version of this software.
Not gonna lie, i dont get that shit either. They are studying English, not accounting, programming etc. One would think schools can teach the ins and outs of various programs. When i was in school, they had contracts with companies and wouldnt teach the other system. I w onder if something goes on now?
I see Taiwanese friends or acquaintances who are much more IT-savvy than me and with a decent English regularly making a mess out of capitalisation, punctuation and formatting. I think that they are not taught how to properly type in English (or in any “abc” language for what that matters), so they just chabuduo their way through without thinking too much.
I remember doing the same chabuduo thing with the Chinese punctuation (，、。) and formatting until I bumped into that kind of lecturer who would straight-away invalidate an exam (the hell she did ) for that. It worked wonders.
Long ago, I encountered the same sort of issues with people who were not familiar with IT. After trying to answer their to me inscrutable questions based on opaque logic, I think that their logic was, like a typewriter, based on the idea that any text entered was immediately and permanently bound to a fixed location on a fixed page, never changing.
One guy, when writing his 100+ page dissertation in Word, asked me, “how can I delete this paragraph, in the middle of the document, and reprint only this page without needing to reprint the rest of the document?” I wonder what his vision was of the ideal result. A big blank space where the original paragraph was? Enlarging the font, the line spacing, or the margins on that page only to fill up the missing space? Printing that page only on a smaller sheet of paper to compensate for the lower amount of content? The concept was alien that that deleting an entire paragraph would potentially affect the pagination of all of the following pages in the document.
I suppose this style of thinking might be forgiven if we consider the usage patterns of slide layout programs like PowerPoint. There, each page (slide) is clearly defined, and your nothing you do on one page (slide) can ever affect any other page. Perhaps the leap of logic, from PowerPoint-style slide editing to fully dynamic pagination of text based on the content, is simply not intuitive for some people.
I had a computer lab at university and the professor gave precise written instructions on how everything should be formatted and exactly how to do it. If your table wasn’t formatted how he liked it you lost points. Twenty years later and every time I format a table in Word or Google docs to make it look pretty I think of that guy. Thanks Professor Mulholland.
Hmm, this may be it. Perhaps that’s why they’re organizing documents this way. It’s certainly not all of them - but it’s more than I’d expect.
And that’s what bewilders me! In the 80s and 90s I could understand why I needed to help show people how to use a word processor, especially those who were moving from typewriters. But have these students today ever used a typewriter?
Yup. Minus points on my assignments, as of the 2nd assignment. First assignment, they’re circled and explained.
I find marking so much easier with DOCX files, because then I can just type in the document itself, and move around with the cursor. Placing comments on PDF is more of a hassle. But the assignments I’m working with are more in the EFL vein, rather than academic papers, so I wind up with many many comments and corrections throughout the assignment.
Oh god no! If I make them resubmit, then I’ve got to mark the damn thing again - or at the least, later - often when we’ve all moved on to the next wave of assignments.
I make them use MLA. Apparently it’s also our departmental policy and I’m more familiar with that one. But mainly it’s a set of rules I can just tell them to follow - and I suspect I’m the first to ever tell them to follow a style guide. And to be honest, after I finished university, messing around with formatting in MS Word & Excel turned out more relevant for office work than any of the academic stuff I’d been doing in classes, so I figure I’m preparing them for the workplace anyway. (Not that I’m familiar with what new employees do in a Taiwanese office in the 2020s.)
In my university at least, most courses are too big to have many submitted written assignments - a lot of the coursework is group presentations or multiple choice / short answer exams. The third-year courses I teach are the first time many of them have submitted anything longer than a page in English. I don’t know what’s expected of them in Chinese-language assignments.
Well, exactly. Assignment after assignment, constantly evaluating. I can barely keep up with them as it is. The last thing I want to do is re-mark old assignments while also marking the newer ones. They get it wrong one time, cool, let’s hope they get it right on the next one a few weeks later.
I allow and encourage resubmission if they want to, but forcing it? Nah. No need to a) wait days to weeks for the resubmitted assignment; b) wait days to weeks for them to respond to the email in which I ask them who this is, and if there should be an attachment; c) wait days to weeks for them to also send me the original assignment like I told them in the first place; d) spend time comparing the two versions to discover they’ve fixed two spelling errors but made no revisions. Not worth anyone’s time.
We was always along the lines of, handed in at a set date, marked and given back bay set date, had to be resubmitted normally 2 days later in the morning (but only original highlighted areas would be checked).
Anything late without an extension was an automatic fail, anything not resubmitted the first draft would be classed as final.
This was pretty standard through school and collage, and most of my lecturers at uni followed a simmer set up, normally based around when they had free periods to mark the work.
Interesting. I only remember very rare times where resubmission was expected, but my memory’s crap so I may have that wrong. It wasn’t unusual for term papers to be submitted in the last class, and if we wanted feedback, we needed to go to the professor’s office later to get it.
I made the decision with my classes a long time ago that fitting in more assignments was more valuable for the students than fewer assignments with more stages for revisions. A few will significantly improve their work with revisions, but not many of them.
we always had a class between submission and resubmission, and the lecturer would go over anything that was a common problem in all the papers (so they couldn’t be accused of miss-teaching that part). Final class we would get our marks and normally have a pretty relaxed class as everyone was ready for the brake. the only ones handing in last class normally had extensions (with or without marks capped depending what had been negotiated).
I come from a low socio-economic area so maybe this was implemented to keep us all on track.
I dare not try to calculate the ratio of how much time I spend EXPLICITLY teaching Word functions (page breaks, indents, font style and size, spacing, justification, “track changes,” and so many more) to the amount of time my students (from freshman to post-graduate) seem to invest in their “submissions.” This calculation might push me over the edge of my erstwhile patient demeanor.
This is the drudgery of dealing with students’ poorly formatted, organized, and written compositions. Personally speaking, I feel that I have to start fresh with every single class of students and spend at least 10 to 15 minutes a week for 3 to 4 weeks (or more) directly teaching them the basics of how to format correctly using Word (PDF simply doesn’t offer the same options, and I am sometimes unable to leave a comment where a well-worded comment or revision would be preferable). I require APA format, but would accept anything resembling a well thought-out and organized essay. I have shown them examples from my own publications in APA, MLA, and Vancouver style just to let them know that all I require is a reasonable and logical organization.
Shame on their elementary, junior, and senior high School teachers were not teaching these basic Word functions, haha! Mostly kidding. Honestly speaking, we all know the quality (experience) of our students is decreasing (with the birthrate). For composition or research courses, I still have low expectations, and I assume that I will need to teach them from the basics. Thus is our job!
Do you require or suggest that they use Word for the actual writing? I mostly haven’t bothered teaching specifically about Word because I get the sense they’re using a bunch of different word processors - I suspect some are even typing (dictating?) essays in the Notes app on their phones, and then doing who knows what dark magic to eventually send me a DOCX file.
Plus I use OpenOffice off PortableApps in class, so I can have consistent word processing software on different computers. I never know what’s going to happen when I open a DOCX file on one of the classroom computers, or what interface I’m going to face. Current Word on a Mac, I’m fine. A possibly 2007 version of Word on a Chinese-only Windows computer, nope, I’m not going to help anyone. With distance learning right now, I can theoretically screen share what I’m doing in Word, but that’s not very good at capturing mouse movements or menus - nor do I know how different the Mac interface is from Windows.
I’ve got a couple of students who I know are good with computers, and are friends with students who are NOT good. I’m considering asking some of those good students to run a 10-15 minute tutorial on how to do this stuff.
I do, actually. It’s the workplace norm and they should get used to it. Even if it’s not, they need to know that in the real world they need to meet the standards of the person who is supervising them. Some of them seem to use illegal or online versions of the software that results in inevitable formatting issues. I do let them, but only for the final version, use PDF to show their complete work.
) for that. It worked wonders.