As a new medium for teaching the skills and strategies we currently value in freshman composition, the most obvious advantage the Web brings is that it provides student writers with an audience beyond the confines of the classroom, and it provides them as well with genuine rather than hypothetical contexts and demands in which to situate their writing. Publishing their work on the Web may serve to increase students’ motivation to write correctly and well, and it may also enhance their awareness of rhetorical dimensions of audience and purpose. Because of their unfamiliarity with this medium, the various stages of their composing process may be more evident to students as they decide on the content, structure, style, and tone of their site.

In addition to advancing current goals, writing for the Web introduces new areas in which students may develop expertise, potentially broadening our practices in freshman composition and in the field of composition as a whole. Questions of navigation and interactivity enter into the picture as the hypertextual structure of Web documents allows students to create multiple paths through their texts. Stylistic choices may shift as students consider the differences between reading from a page and reading from a screen. The multimedia capabilities of the Web bring visual communication into the mix of what might be taught in writing courses. In these and other ways, Web writing assignments have the potential to introduce interesting new classroom practices that might help prepare our students to participate more effectively in an increasingly technologically-mediated society.