About us, about this project

We’re upper-division English majors at Tennessee Tech University in a spring 2017 capstone course--"Senior Colloquium: Why We Write" (ENGL 4995). This project is designed to help students deeply consider how writing and writers work by engaging in a conversation with one of our textbooks, Mark Edmundson's Why Write?, which proposes more than two dozen reasons why literate humans write, each in a different chapter. For this project, each student summarized one chapter from Edmundson's book and wrote a new version, perhaps expanding the original author's ideas, perhaps providing additional examples or claims, perhaps providing counterarguments, perhaps integrating the student's own experiences. These chapter-rewrites provide an opportunity for students to step into Edmundson's text, to propose new perspectives or new examples to the chapter, try it on, take it for a spin, to own a new version of the selected chapter. 

Each student's "chapter" is published as a single blog entry, and its title reflects Edmundson's original chapter title. To navigate the site, select a title in the Blog Archive (right column). We invite you to read, enjoy, and offer comments. By the way, purchasing your own copy of Edmunson's text is highly recommended!

Thanks for reading!