For primarily practical reasons, professional writing courses are increasingly being taught totally or partly online. This past year, I taught several partly online sections of my professional writing course, and I discovered that a strategy valuable in my traditional sections became invaluable in my online sections: electronic response.

Since the focus of the course is on mastering the process of completing various professional writing assignments, much emphasis is placed on draft response. In the traditional sections, this response is a combination of oral and electronic comments, but, in the online sections, it was totally electronic. The surprising result, for most groups, was an intensification of the benefits I had seen with electronic response in my earlier research and experience. As the students described them, these were the most significant benefits:

I observed all of these benefits described by the students, but I was most impressed with the way these benefits manifested themselves in the revisions themselves. More than I had ever noted with traditional response, the students made revisions that were closely associated with the suggestions, and these revisions were overwhelmingly effective in improving their writing.

In my presentation, I share not only examples of beneficial electronic peer responses but also details on my preparation of the groups and the dynamics of the groups that created those beneficial responses. My experience convinced me that online professional writing courses, although increasing for primarily practical reasons, offer important opportunities both to improve our students’ writing through electronic response and to prepare our students for professional careers that increasingly involve electronic response to writing.