Whatever you produce joins dozens of other efforts in a stack whose growing thickness doesn't exactly thrill your professor. But still he'll soldier on and read, and maybe re-read, and mark up and grade each one. Along the way he might leave short contextual notes in the margin; he might write one long critique at the end; he might do both; or he might do neither and let your grade do all the talking.

Trouble is, no matter how detailed and incisive the feedback, by the time it gets back to you it's already too late -- and, in a way, too early. Too late because your paper has already been written, and what you really needed help with was its composition, with the micromechanics of style, with all the small decisions that led you to say whatever it is you said. And too early because even if the professor's ex post pointers make every bit of sense, a whole month might go by before you next get to use them.

This is not the way to develop a complicated skill. It would be like trying to master the violin, say, by going blind to a recital, having an expert tell you all the ways you've failed, and letting that gestate for a few weeks before your next recital.

It's no wonder that so many students struggle with writing: you're never really shown how to do it. Your practice is sporadic and undirected. You're expected to pick it up, basically, perhaps by reading, perhaps by winging an essay here and there. Which is like expecting a kid to pick up tennis by watching lots of Wimbledon and losing in the early rounds of the occasional junior tournament.

* * *

Professors will sometimes gesture toward a better approach -- they'll share an example of good writing in class and walk through the specific reasons it works; they'll hold office hours or encourage one-on-one sessions to work on drafts -- but still that leaves the central problem: that their guidance, however individuated, isn't fast enough. That it's too much of a loping catechism, not enough the snappy dialogue of master and apprentice. Or as John Whittier-Ferguson puts it, "It's moving at a pace that's not at all like the pace of someone actually working on a piece of writing."

Whittier-Ferguson is a professor of English at the University of Michigan who has been teaching for thirty years. All along he's wanted a way to work with students on their writing as they were writing -- when they were most in need of, and most receptive to, targeted concrete feedback.

It's a tall order. The "English class" has long been a pedagogical vehicle freighted with too many imperatives: teach them how to read carefully, how to think, how to engage the culture, how to write. It's hard to do it all -- hard, especially, when you're one and they're thirty and your principal weapon is an hourlong lecture.

But then came electronic mail. The instant transmission of text. With e-mail, Whittier-Ferguson didn't have to so much invent a wonderfully responsive critical machine as become one: sit at his computer; encourage students to send him work in progress; respond to it quickly. That's all it had to be. And yet that simple practice would incubate "a whole new order of engagement and exchange with their writing that just wasn't there" when he started teaching in the late seventies.