How might an assignment that combines Web writing with community service help improve students' writing skills? As noted elsewhere, the fact that the Web provides students with a "real-world" audience--that is, an audience external to the classroom--may help increase students' motivation to do their best writing. Clarity, correctness, and stylistic effectiveness may become more meaningful goals to students if they know that their writing will appear on the Web for all the world to see.

The element of community service may also increase students' motivation to write well; for instance, if they are creating a site that represents a community organization or agency, students may spend more time revising and correcting their work so that it presents a professional, detailed, and accurate portrayal of this group.

An example of a Web writing assignment that achieves these goals was designed by Floyd Ogburn and Barbara Wallace at University College of the University of Cincinnati. (Unfortunately, Freshman Profiles of Social Service Agencies, the site containing the work of Ogburn's and Wallace's students, was taken off the Web in August 2002). Ogburn and Wallace asked students to write profiles of social service agencies in the Cincinnati area. The profiles were then compiled, categorized, and posted on the Web. As explained at the NCTE Service-Learning in Composition site, the assignment was the capstone project of a collaborative, year-long sequence of composition courses taught by Ogburn and Wallace in 1996 and 1997. In earlier courses in the sequence, students were introduced to community issues and to the concept of community service learning; they worked on developing critical thinking and writing skills, and they received preparation for the community service-learning they did in the third course of the sequence.

A reading of the profiles makes it clear that students spent time crafting their work. For instance, many of the profiles begin with an engaging introduction: a quote from an interview, an anecdote, a detailed description of the setting of the agency, a surprising statistic. In most of the profiles, attention is given to integrating quotations smoothly and citing sources correctly in the bibliography. Although the profiles are not devoid of errors, the quality of the writing is impressive, especially for students in a first-year course.

In the Introduction section of the site, Ogburn and Wallace confirm the impression that developing students' writing skills is the key goal of the assignment. They write,

In addition to giving our students a chance to do real writing assignments for real audiences, these profiles provided them opportunities to employ their writing skills to offer real solutions to the social ills they had been examining. That is, the profiles enabled our students to use writing to become productive and socially responsible citizens, perhaps the ultimate goal of any successful freshman writing sequence. ("Introduction")

The development of writing abilities is closely connected to students' development as "productive and socially responsible citizens," underscoring the social-constructivist orientation of the pedagogy that Ogburn and Wallace employ here.