by Denise

Fascinating! We’ve partnered with a professor at nearby Grand Valley State University who is having his professional writing students try their hand at dynamic web publishing.

Leading up to the assignment, students are blogging their ruminations on assigned reading and actually applying it to The Rapidian. Demographics, social and cultural reading environments, audience’s values… We’ve long suspected but never had the time to map it out. Their perception is incredible feedback for us and neatly categorized to boot.

Read all four analyses (group 3 did an especially nice job):

• Group 1: Characteristics of The Rapidian Audience
• Group 2: Group discussion - Considering The Rapidian
• Group 3: Rapidian rhetorical analysis
• Group 4: I am a Rapidian reader

Some other highlights:

• It feels as though The Rapidian is akin to a local diner. It is a place where the community goes to catch up, but isn’t well known to those outside the community.
  —Brennen Gorman

• Grand Rapids is not that big, but such an open-ended writing prompt can make this city seem enormous. Our class alone will add something like forty new articles to the base of stories about this town of little more than 200.000. It’s pretty cool, and with so many articles being generated we can really know what is going down in GR. Hopefully we won’t get picked on for talking about ourselves too much…
  —John DeRuiter

• So now I’m faced with a challenge unlike any other class assignment I’ve had so far: writing a piece that I can’t take for granted will be read. I have to admit, it’s a strange situation to find myself in. As I’m sure many others have, I’ve assumed having an audience interested in what I write. But this challenge also presents an exciting opportunity—finding an opening to fill that will get readers interested in my piece.
  —Dale Johnson