Writing Commons

08/21/2025

Dear fellow teachers....

For this fall, I've cooked up a new version of my Writing with AI course. Here’s the intro:

“This course invites you to explore how generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping creativity, authorship, composing, learning, copyright, and work—and what that means for human agency. We will study writing as a technology, from cuneiform tablets to typewriters, and how each tool’s affordances and constraints influence thought, communication, and creation. You’ll conduct textual research on GenAI’s effects on cognition, academic integrity, and authorship; qualitative research through autoethnography and peer interviews on how students and workers use GenAI; and literature-based forecasting on AI’s impact on employment, job competencies, and the emergence of AGI and ASI. Throughout, you’ll write with and about AI to examine whether these tools enhance or diminish self-expression, thinking, creativity, and human agency.”

This undergraduate course challenges students to research the affordances and constraints of generative AI (GenAI), especially with regards to the effects of GenAI on human agency, creativity, authorship, academic integrity, copyright, intellectual property, and the future of work.

03/18/2024

Dear Colleagues and Students,

If you don't know about Writing Commons or you haven't been there in a while, I hope you'll take a moment to check us out.

We now have about 1000 articles on matters of concern to writers. Our articles are peer reviewed, written by well regarded university professors and graduate students, and organized under major topics:

APA - 7th Edition
Citation
Collaboration
Design
Discourse
Editing
Genre
Grammar
Information Literacy
Literacy
Mindset
MLA – 9th Edition
Organization
Research
Revision
Rhetoric
Style
The Elements of Style
The Writing Process - Research on Composing

06/25/2023

I’m thrilled to share that Kairos has awarded Writing Commons the John Lovas Award for digital scholarship at the Computers & Composition Conference (on 6/24/2023).

Every year Kairos awards the John Lovas Award to a person or project that engages in sustained engagement with topics in rhetoric, composition, or computers and writing. This honor is given to an individual or project that displays an active and consistent engagement with research and scholarship in rhetoric, composition, and computers and writing. It is awarded to authors and projects that explore the rhetoricity of new writing tools and epitomize public intellectualism, as John Lovas did with his blogging and digital scholarship.

Writing Commons is an experiment in authorship, peer-production, collaboration, community, and digital publishing. Over the last past twenty years, we have published over 200 peer-reviewed articles. Most of these works are published under a Creative Commons copyright license. The editorial process is managed by our Co-Editors-in-Chief:

Cassandra Branham, Associate Professor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Megan McIntyre, Director of Rhetoric, University of Arkansas.

I thank Cheryl Ball and Douglas Eyman for their amazing work on Kairos and ongoing invisible work sustaining the computers and composition community. I thank Kristi McDuffie, Chair of the Awards Committee and our peer reviewers.

I thank my colleagues and coauthors at Writing Commons, especially Cassandra Branham; Megan McIntyre; Quentin Vieregge; Jenifer D'Elia Paquette; Angela Eward-Mangione; Jennifer Jencheck; Kendra Bryant; Christine Photinos;
Jenna Pack Sheffield

10/17/2022

Good News: For 2022, we've now had over 1 million visitors visit Writing Commons for help with their writing and coursework. Nice to see our students and teachers find the site of some use.....

We aspire to keep improving the site. We welcome your feedback and contributions.

01/05/2021

For 2020, we focused on revising the site, improving the navigation and site architecture. Along the way, we wrote an additional 300 articles.....And now, as we begin the new year, we are focused on building new courses so folks can see how our commons can be used productively in the classroom.

Hopefully....in 2021 we can also give some attention to marketing out site so folks know about all of the revisions....

Meanwhile, our readership for 2020 was pretty good...certainly not terrible.....Our challenge is it's taking so long to really complete the site so that it meets our readers' needs.....But we are getting closer and we believe in time quality will net a really significant global readership.

12/31/2019

I would like to wish all a Happy New Year and to let you know that we have some exciting changes coming to WritingCommons.org for 2020! We are expanding the site significantly with new content and our goal is to create an online encyclopedia for academic and professional writing. As a disclaimer for any future posts of mine, I manage the technical side of the site and not the lessons or articles... those are created by trained and licensed professionals. Once again, Happy New Year!

Alston Chapman

11/19/2019

Preparing the 4th edition of Writing Commons has been loads of work....TBH, it's been such a heavy lift that I'm not sure we would have done it if not for Google Analytics.
Seeing the utility of our efforts is a bit inspiring.....Right now it's pleasant to see so many.users logged on--reading such a range of pages....from all over..........

Happy to report we are on track for publishing the 4th edition in January.

10/29/2019

Happy to see we've reached 9 million users.....

We continue to work on the new edition, and we anticipate posting it in January 2020.

09/10/2019

Good to see that we are approaching 9 million users at Writing Commons. This is encouraging to us as we work to basically tear down the foundations of our past efforts and rebuild. It's so rewarding and affirming to feel the reader over your shoulder. We hope to relaunch soon....

01/17/2019

During 2018, 1,195,250 people consulted Writing Commons for help with teaching or writing. Since its inception, we have helped over 8+M users.

12/15/2016

Thanks to the amazing Alston Chapman, we are sporting a new look/feel at Writing Commons. We are trying a new navigational scheme....Does it work for you?