"Recopying to Revise: Composition in an Old Key"

I am not certain what to make of Kratzke's loosely organized article.  Half a dirge for the failing standards of literacy in America and half a vague discussion of the role of computers in that failure "Recopying to Revise" left me frustrated with its lack of discussion of its title subject.  While Kratzke dispenses paeans to revision such as "we need to tell our students to slow down and double back, if only for a moment,"  (10) there is very little on the actual process of recopying and its effects or benefits.  

Instead Kratzke bemoans student thoughtlessness, the ease with which computers encourage students to dispense with revision altogether, the loss of literacy as a cognitive activity in world increasingly dominated by the image rather than the word.  

When I encountered the rhetorical question "How can we, without sounding like machine-smashing Luddites, convince our students that something as tedious as recopying can be beneficial to their abilities with technology?", I hope Kratzke might begin addressing recopying to revise in a practical manner, as an applicable classroom strategy.  Normally, when one poses a rhetorical question one answers it.  Ah, but not this time!  Instead, the reader is set up for an answer to one of the key questions of the text only to be diverted to a discussion of "recopying to revise suggests as much about technology in our lives as it does about the writing process"  (10).  To my knowledge Kratzke never returns to the rhetorical question ending the paragraph before.  There is a later reference to telling students that "it is all about the benjamins," but I fail to see how students could be convinced that recopying will drive them towards monetary rewards, except in the vague sense that we use monetary rewards to justify all education.  

When the practical aspects of the technique are finally addressed at the end of the article Kratzke says that "implementing recopying in the classroom might involve exchanging single paragraphs or using a sample paragraph as a common source."  While this cut down approach does make sense in light of all the objections (including the threat to one's job of student boredom with/resentment of teaching techniques which he acknowledges on pg. 19) he raises through various naysayers he's planted in the text, it seems to defeat his principle reason for suggesting the technique: that the act of recopying one's own paper is "revising in the truest sense of the word - to re-see expressions and ideas" and that "it [is] painfully obvious that the recopied version [is] superior to the original."  

While I know from my own experience that recopying the text can lead to the very opportunities for improvement that Kratzke indicates and appreciate his desire to inspire students to true, old fashioned re-vision, in which multiple drafts of a paper are created in order to develop the best possible product, I find this loose, periphrastic discussion of the topic confusing and can only wish that Kratzke had delivered a more practical, practice based discussion of the issue at hand.