Blogging and Academic Writing Development

Abstract

This chapter discusses the use of blogging in a beginning level academic writing course. Blogging was used in this writing course both as a means of interacting with the other students and as a means of discussing the issues the students were to write about in their classroom assignments, all of which dealt with issues related to the nature of plagiarism and what policies towards plagiarism should the university adopt. The chapter analyzes the blogs of an African immigrant student. It is argued that the use of blogs allows the students to develop a variety of rhetorical strategies outside the confines of the course that could then be transferred into the student’s academic writing assignments.

Key Terms in this Chapter

Plagiarism: The inappropriate appropriation of texts.

Blogs: On line journals that can be updated frequently and contain a feed that notifies readers when they have been updated.

Blogosphere: The network of blogs that exists on the Internet.

Literacy: The ability to read and write information from a fixed medium.

Generation 1.5: Immigrant students who arrived after acquiring their first language but who spent at least some time in English-language schools.

Computer-Mediated Communication: The variety of forms of communication that can occur using the Internet.

Academic Writing: The genre of writing frequently found in a university context.