WRITING for REAL:
Rhetorics of the Service-Learning Contact Zone

About Community Writing

Community Writing Program is a venture of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University in cooperation with the Haas Center for Public Service. The Community Writing Project is one of several assignments in PWR classes with CWP components. The Community Writing Project extends students' experiences, thinking, and writing beyond the University and into the community at large.

"Writing for Real" is one of several classes in PWR this quarter designated as a Community Writing course. While satisfying a portion of the writing requirement of this class, Community Writing offers students the opportunity to write something of specific and tangible use for a nonprofit organization outside the university. Most Community Writing is published and distributed to a much larger audience, and to different kinds of readers, than college writers are accustomed to. With the Community Writing Project, students make a contribution the larger community, and their writing stands to have a real effect on people and policies.

CWP: How It Works in General

Students taking -- and instructors teaching -- courses in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric choose whether or not to participate in the Community Writing Project. The summer before they arrive on campus, first-year students elect whether or not they will be placed in a class with a designated Community Writing component.

Most instructors and students who participate in the Community Writing Project do so for two reasons:

1) They see Community Service Writing as an opportunity to extend the audiences for and the purposes of their writing outside a traditional academic context, an opportunity to engage in "real" writing, and

2) They wish to apply course content to issues and communities outside the university, to ground theoretical discussions of, say, multicultural, race, gender, or environmental issues to "real" world situations.

Community Writing lends itself, therefore, to purposeful learning and purposeful writing.

CWP: How It Works in "Writing for Real"

Our class will be offered a selection of potential placements with various community nonprofit organizations. These organizations need writers to complete a variety of writing tasks, possibly including newsletter articles, press releases, brochures, manuals, reports, fact sheets, grant proposals, Web pages, and other projects. After learning more about the organizations and their needs, students are placed -- usually with one or two other students from the class -- with an organization that corresponds with their interests. The writing that students produce for their organizations, if it is good enough according to agencies' standards, will appear in print or be incorporated into important in-house documents. The Community Writing Project involves independent work and requires a high degree of reliability on students' parts since it is, essentially, an internship and agencies rely on students to fulfill real writing needs.