Publication Motivates a Vast Majority of the Students

Publication is a great motivational tools for many students, involving even those who don’t consider themselves to be writers (Lange, 1992) and makes them feel proud of themselves and what they have accomplished (King & Stovall, 1992). The most striking part of this activity [publishing project] is how virtually all student writers are motivated to do their very best writing and revising (Graff, 1992).

As Ensio & Boxeth (2000), explain, classroom publication motivates many students:

Publication often serves as a motivational tool for those who are not interested in writing at all. In the experimental projects conducted by Dollieslager, Thompson, and Pedersen (1993),
many different types of students who published showed positive results. “When they saw the publication, even the two most jaded teenagers for whom ‘school ain’t cool’ were openly pleased to see their names in print and realized that their work would be useful to someone else.” (5)

These students discovered the value of writing and were rewarded for their efforts. Publishing prompted them to take pride in their work. Lack of experience or lack of appropriate opportunities may explain their prior hesitancy or negative attitudes toward writing. When challenged, however, these students rose to the occasion. Students set higher expectations and goals when given the incentive of publication. (Dollieslager, 1993). (11)

Solomon (1993) and Putnam (2001) reinforce this idea: “However they celebrated, they had one thing in common—the pride of publishing. Even the students who had complained incessantly about the project didn’t have a negative word to say about their finished product.

In an e-mail message she sent to Chris Weber, Elinore Kaplan, a high school teacher in Queens, New York describes the impact publishing has in motivating most of her students, increasing their self-esteem, and filling them with pride:

When they know it’s for publication, most students will take greater care and more time with their work.They are so much more willing to do another draft, and still another because eyes other than theirs and mine will read it.

I’ve published student work in our school newspaper and our literary magazine. In both cases, students realize their work will be read by hundreds of their peers as well as their teachers. Surprisingly, opportunities like this often inspire students whose classwork and homework is mediocre or nonexistent. The student who’s shown little ability or willingness to do assignments will come up to me with one or two poems or a whole book of them and shyly offer them to me, asking if I would read them over and perhaps publish one or two. So, in this case, the opportunity to publish motivates the poorer students to work. Again, when I make editorial suggestions, they are eager to rework their poems and essays. The process erases the teacher/student barrier and makes us collaborators for a higher purpose. Without a doubt, publishing enhances these students’ self-esteem.

And, finally, I’ve submitted student work for various city, state, and national essay and poetry contests. I don’t get a lot of entries, and often I’m the one pushing specific students to enter these. However, when those students gain recognition for their entries it’s Christmas everywhere. In all of the instances I’ve mentioned, one can virtually see the students whose work is published grow inches before one’s eyes. They stand taller and walk prouder. A different light gleams in their eyes. I apologize for being trite in my words, but I am being honest. Publication is vital to students, to having them believe that their thoughts and words have value, to having them see themselves as individuals whose contribution to society matters.

Publishing is a Powerful Means of Motivating Revision

As Donald Murray (1982) says, writing is rewriting, and revision is the crucial process of making changes throughout the writing of drafts of a piece to make the final draft congruent with a writer’s changing intentions (Sommers, 1982; Thomas, 2000). Simply telling students that they are required to revise will not necessarily produce improved writing (Adams, 1991). Nowhere is the motivation stronger to revise than when student writers write to publish.

Both common sense and empirical data support the belief that students who value writing tend to invest more time and energy in it (NAEP Framework, 1998). Publishing causes students to see their work as valuable, and as a result, they will invest themselves more in their writing when they know it is going to be published (Swartout & Densteadt, 2002; Graff, 1992). For more than twenty years in his teaching career, Chris Weber has worked with more than a thousand students and has observed that their revision efforts were the strongest when they were writing be published and read by a wider audience.

With increased time and energy spent on revising, students’ revising skills improve, and along with it, their writing.

The literature clearly shows that student publications have an impact on increasing students’ interest and efforts in editing and revising (Conner & Moulton, 2000; Putnam, 2001). Bromley & Mannix (1993) describe publishing’s motivational value:

Publishing makes the reading-writing connection real as it engages students in the writing process and the communication of meaning to a wider audience. The opportunity to publish one’s work for others to see, touch, read, and reread has special appeal and provides many students with the incentive to write. (72)

Publishing their work gives worth to their words, a forum for their voices, and instills in them pride and a sense of accomplishment (Holmes & Moulton, 1994; Lehr, 1995; Ensio & Boxeth, 2000; Putnam, 2001; Weber, 2002), which provides a strong incentive to produce their best work (Wilhelm, 2000; King & Stovall, 1992). Giving students the opportunity to share their writing through self-published booklets, newspapers, magazines, e-mail publication projects, newsletters, or displayed on a classroom website shows them that quality matters, and the quality is achieved through revision (Balajthy, 1986).

Peter Elbow (2002), one of America’s best known writing teachers, explains why publishing is the single strongest way to encourage students to revise and copyedit:

Like most writing teachers, I preach and hector and cajole as well as I can about the benefits of revising and copyediting. I keep devising clever exercises to promote them: “At last this one will be foolproof!” But they’re all remarkably ineffective compared to the simple fact of publishing students’ writing over and over again so that they read over their own essays in class magazines. I come back to a brute but subtle fact: they see their own words differently because they’re in a magazine that they see in every fellow student’s hand. They have read over their essay a number of times in the process of revising it, but this subtle and peculiar ability to see your own words as others will see them is hard to learn—for all of us. I believe publication is the single strongest way to help encourage students to revise and copyedit. (4-5)

There is increased concern and attention (both by the public and educators) for ensuring that our young people develop mastery of all writing traits, especially conventions (e.g., spelling, grammar and usage, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing). Andrasick (1993) realizes publication encourages students to edit more carefully: “Frequent publication creates a powerful claim for students to value mechanical conventions. . . . [As] students begin to publish and get feedback from others, they learn to give even single words the same grooming they give themselves: they comb their prose for the smallest confusions caused by unconventional punctuation.”

Connor’s (2000) students’ reflections show that they were “combing” their prose:

In the editing, that is different. In the writing I try hardest to do even without pressure or knowing people are going to read it. In editing a report or a story that is just for a grade I edit it once, but in a report or story that is for competition, then I edit like 16 times. — Renee, Middle School Student. (78)

To me, [publishing] makes me want to succeed more. It makes me work harder knowing that probably more than one person would be reading it. . . . When I did the research paper for my book, I wanted it to be practically perfect because a lot of different people would be judging it. If only one person looked at a
piece of writing, they would only be looking for maybe one or two things, but if other people looked at it, all of the stuff in the research paper or poem, etc. would be looked at and judged. — Katie, Middle School Student. (78)

Student Publication Raises the Bar for Teachers, too

The previous cited literature documents how publishing encourages students to do their very best. With publication, their standards are higher. Like adult writers, students want to display and share their best work for others for years to come. Swope (2002) explains the impact that publishing had on his teaching efforts:

But the stories in my students’ chapbooks were pretty polished, and that’s because chapbooks upped the ante not just for the children, but for me. I wanted my students to look back on these books years from now and be proud, and that meant extra drafts, extra editing, extra cajoling, extra nagging. I found the effort well worth it, though, and unlike the stapled anthologies in my filing cabinet, my students’ chapbooks sit on the bookshelf, proud memories of my time with those children. (70)

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