Your task for this assignment is to find a piece of writing online that (a) is something other than a conventional blog post, and (b) makes interesting use of the affordances of the web. That is, you’ll want to look for a piece of writing that tries to do something that an ordinary print text cannot. Post a link to your text and write a brief comment noting what you find interesting about it.

The goal of this assignment is to begin to form an archive of possibilities, ideas, potential models digital essays that writers in this course might want to attempt. I’ve suggested Welcome to Pine Point, by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simon, as a kind of high-end example of the possibilities of the form. Let me offer two more modest examples from my own academic field (rhetoric and writing):

• Cindy Selfe, The Watson Symposium: What Might We be Missing and Why?

Cindy Selfe, Watson Symposium

• Daniel Anderson, Toward a Rhetoric of Layers
  

  Daniel Anderson, Layers

What interests me are the attempts of both authors to catch something that’s hard to evoke on the printed page (and especially a page in an academic journal). Selfe tries to offer a sense of an actual interchange between scholars; Anderson tries to peel away the layers of work that go into composing a web text. If I were to criticize the two texts, I’d say that Selfe’s strikes me as a little goofy and Anderson’s as a little abstruse, but I remain impressed by the ambitiousness of both.

I’m eager to see what kinds of texts impress and interest you. Please use r5 as your category and post your work by 9:00 am, on Tues, 2/21.