BECAUSE DIGITAL WRITING MATTERS

Because Digital Writing Matter 
by Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, & Troy Hicks

Back Cover Blurb:
     "The connectivity of the internet and the latest digital technologies have opened vast new opportunities, format, and audiences for writing.  Digital writing involves more than just word processing an essay or punching out an e-mail message; students can blog, text message, chat online, or create narratives for multi-media productions.
     Based on case studies, interviews with educational professionals, and a decade's worth of research, BDWM offers proven strategies to equip students with the communications skills that will enable them to thrive in our information-rich, high-speed, high-tech culture."

---

---

I just received my copy of Because Digital Writing Matters today in the mail.  As both a technology enthusiast and a member of the PBWP, I felt a need to read this book released by the NWP.  I'm only about 30 pages into the book, but I;m already finding a lot of good points that the book raises.

• Although students compose a lot of digital writing (via e-mail, text messages, Facebook updated, etc., they do not actually view this as writing.  For students, there is a disconnect between the writing that they engage in every day and the writing that they do in the classroom (p. 19-20).
• "Computers provide a more complex space for writing, offering writers a whole new set of options to consider.  Computer composition allows for multimedia components such as voice recording, audio, image, video, and more.  Along with these media components, writers have access to array of tools and spaces in which texts can be composed and shared...So for anyone who imagined that computers would make writing easier, the irony is that by making a host of indivual tasks easier, computers have dramatically expanded options for writers and have probably made writing, and learning to write, more complex" (p. 21).
• "Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach" (p. 26).