Student writers labeled "underprepared" by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term "underprepared" varies across institutional contexts, the…

Presents results from a study of eight college freshman to determine differences between revising essays on-screen and on-paper. Eighty-one percent of on-screen changes were above the mechanical or word level, often related to meaning and content. Students working on-screen tended to add more information and recreate paragraphs, but sometimes…