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 This is the first page of the story written by Naomi and Kate whose progress we follow. The point they reached at the end of Lesson One is where they placed three asterisks.
The girls were pleased with the idea of representing Alice, from the White Rabbit’s point of view, as “a strange being”; and with their use of “orifice” which Mrs Kelly had commended as “a good word”.
However they commented on how little they had written. Both said they would have written more if they had been working individually with pen and paper.
What preoccupied them and all the other writers in the class in this first lesson was the selection of a font to compose in. This response to writing on computer was observed by all teachers in the English Subject Design Team. It was generally perceived initially as one of the disadvantages of giving students computers to write on - they wasted time fiddling with fonts. At the same time in the team we were considering ideas about computers and their potential for creating in different modes and media. We thought maybe we should try to understand more about this font obsession. Re-writing Alice was one of the subject design initiatives which we used to think about this.
This is what Naomi and Kate said:
“We decided what the story was going to be
about and then we like did all the fonts.
We wanted to make it look really good.”
“It’s quite nice and tall. I think it looks a bit like when Lewis Carroll was…old fashionedy sort of…”
“We sort of had to pick one we both liked ‘cos there’s like the one I liked but Kate hated. And the one she liked and I hated…so this was one we both liked… there wasn’t anything wrong with it.”
“And it fills more of the page so it looks like you’ve written more.”
We think we see here evidence of :
- A strong desire to match form and content – the choice of font will help them as writers to find the voice of the narrative.
- Their awareness of the semiotic charge of graphics for writers and readers.
- Negotiation of the terms of the collaboration via font choice.
- Awareness of the criterion of quantity which frequently haunts writing activity in school.
- A rejection of the traditional model of the writing process which puts consideration of presentation at the end.
Pam’s Reflections
“It was a complete surprise to me that in the first session they couldn’t leave the font thing alone. It was fascinating because it wasn’t something I’d anticipated at all. I really thought that if I explained the whole process to them and said we’ll have the final week to play around and make it look beautiful…do whatever you want to do, that they’d be able to accept that…But the whole lot of them couldn’t leave it alone from the word go. I’d never experienced seeing the whole lot of them working on a piece of writing for such a long period of time. I’d never really bothered to think about whether fonts were such a big deal."
"Another time I would say to them, spend the first lesson deciding on your font…look at the fonts, see what you like the look of, choose one. I think it would be very interesting to ask why is this important, what does this font ‘say’, why does it appeal.”
We produced a model of the writing process with the computer
| National Curriculum and Literacy
strategy model for teaching the writing process |
Pupils’ model when using technology to make texts
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Plan, draft, edit, revise, proofread and present (DfEE 2001 p.24) |
Concern for the visual design of the text from the start |
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Integration of language, typography, graphics and structural design features throughout to make meaning |
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ORGANIC
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Matthewman S. and Triggs P. (2004)
For a more detailed consideration of the font issue see:
‘Obsessive Compulsive Font Disorder’: The challenge of supporting pupils writing with the computer
Sasha Matthewman and Pat Triggs, Computers and Education, Vol 43 Issues 1-2 pp125-135
If you are interested in ideas about Literacy, Multimodality look in Things to Read for some suggestions.
"Each writer is a graphic designer as well as a composer of words...The 'look of the page' is a general concern and the means of page design are readily there."
Gunter Kress (1998)
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