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Using the WWWriters' PLACE as a webbed rhetoric

The WWWriters' PLACE functions well as the content of a workshop course in writing. While the WWWriters' PLACE was first conceived as an electronic text for a college freshman writing course, it has been successfully adapted and expanded for developmental college writing courses as well as technical writing. Creative writing courses are also planned.

The rhetorical elements of purpose, language, audience, context, and evidence (PLACE) are common to all writing situations. Writers must engage strategies for discovering ideas, planning, drafting, revising and publishing or evaluating in order to accomplish their purposes with their target audiences. Strategies for controlling the writing process in a variety of rhetorical situations is the content common to all writing courses.

One of the advantages of the WWWriters' PLACE is that this electronic rhetoric is non-linear, just as the writing process itself is non-linear. Writers can move around the web in the same way they are moving around within the writing process to complete an assignment or project. It works like this. There are four main elements of a writing course:

1. The course syllabus
2. Writing assignments, workshops or projects
3. The writing process and the study of rhetorical theory and strategies
4. Collaboration and readers' responses to writing

Any teacher can design a syllabus and post it on any server using any course management software including Web CT and Desire2Learan. With our written permission, you may use the projects published at the WWWriters PLACE to build your syllabus, or you may design your own assignments and link them to the WWWrtiers' PLACE homepage or specific topics within the site.

The WWWriters' PLACE projects are designed as workshops to complete specific assignments. Each workshop has the same format:

• goals
• main assignment
• modular step-by-step plan for completing the main assignments with links to the writing process and required readings
• process memo, from student to teacher, where the student reflects on what has been learned
• a check-list of project requirements
• a list of additional readings including student examples

You may want to look at this workshop on collaboration, "A Collaborative Study of the Art of Persuasion," as an example of a WWWriters' PLACE project.

The professional development workshops, Online Course Design I & II, lead you step by step through the process of planning and creating a course Web site, adapting the syllabus for online presentation, and building the course content.