Sutter strikers blog, student blogs. My conferences with students this week and my first encounters with the Sutter Strikers Blog show how much energy a blogger gains by having a clearly-defined project or problem. Our conference conversations have been greatly aided by being able to talk about the likely and particular sort of readers the blog is serving and what would interest and inform them. We're able to make good suggestions about the writer's persona or style, the title of the blog, the contents of the sidebar, the approach taken in different sorts of posts, and so forth. It's an old-fashioned sort of teaching about rhetoric.

Some of the students have chosen topics strongly related to their careers, their longtime interests, their political commitments. They get energy from having chosen these topics and also start to build a body of work that might stand as one kind of credential or another later on.* In contrast, for most of the writing classes I've taught over the years, people write papers that they throw in a folder or in the trash at the end of the semester.

*Not to mention that for some of their topics a blog can stand as a kind of rolling rough draft for a book -- as is the case of food blogs, which can sometimes be translated into a cookbook in time. [0 & P]