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This honors first-year composition course invited students to investigate the intricacies of various writing acts by placing them in the position of professional writers. We began by examining what it means to be a writer, locating much of our discussion in Donald Murray's The Craft of Revision as we attempted to recognize and examine our own personal writer identities. Finally, the students played the role of professional writers--crafters of ideas and texts that develop through various stages of revision and that end up in a published form. There were three students in this Honors class, and they each adopted the role of editor for the three different thematic sections comprising this electronic journal: Education, Family, and Science. These thematic sections were determined by the student editors themselves. The students wrote essays for each section and submitted them to the section editors for publication in this electronic journal. The editors were responsible for creating the section home pages, writing the introduction to each section, creating links from the introduction to interesting and informative web sites, editing the student submissions, and posting the student essays to the this journal. The main goal of this Web project was to enable students to engage the various components of personal and public writing, to develop a language to talk about writing and thinking, and to become critical writers and thinkers and thus proactive participants in the world which is itself an ongoing text. We chose to publish our work on the World Wide Web for the following reasons: 1) at this point it is the one publishing medium that is most accessible to student writers and readers; 2) writing for the Web offered a unique opportunity to write for "real" audiences and to investigate what it means to write for actual (yet faceless) readers who will be engaging one's text in a virtual environment; and 3) Web publishing allowed us to talk about emerging electronic "texts" and to study the ways in which the Web is changing our understanding of literacy. I hope you enjoy this page. Please click on the section titles below to view the student essays.
Section 1: Education in America
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