Today individual blogs were due, and we had a few interesting last-minute questions.  Students' task was to publish a piece of writing by former service-learning students, edit it as needed, and build a bridge between that item and the audience of their blog. 

We didn't expect that most students' questions would have to do with citation and reference conventions -- Do I need a reference list entry for the document I'm publishing and attaching?  How do I cite a quotation within a document I'm quoting?  If I paraphrase do I need a page number for each paraphrase?  Each of these questions often had a technological skill related to it, such as the skill of embedding a link to a document, putting a caption on an image, attaching a file at the bottom or top of a post, etc. 

But this was the tip of an iceberg... the majority of the challenge was lurking beneath the surface of their questions.  The questions were a symptom of a larger way in which students' rhetorical skills were being stretched.  Citing and referencing is just one of the many communicative acts that bridge the world of an original source to the world of the current reader.

Overall, the most important lesson seemed to be about one's rhetorical role as a mediator between the public and the world (and words) of a document they were publishing. 

I believe that most students have been so immersed in the subject matter of academic course work, or immersed in the details of their inherited document, that they can easily forget there is a real audience to address.  The audience seems distant, and what seems closer to their own world is that there's an assignment to write and a grade to obtain, and APA guidelines and other rules to follow along the way.  For students who studied their documents well and paraprhased, edited, and summarized it, the immersion in subject matter can be so engrossing that they lose their own voice or identity as writers of a blog post.  Sometimes they forget that the author is separate from themselves, and the boundaries between editor and author blur too much or disappear.

Bridging begins with the audience's side of the river.  The bridge's material is based on the service-learning theme and purpose of the project. The good rhetor will gradually show how certain questions, interests, needs or misunderstandings can be addressed by looking at a former service-learning project through the lens of a document from that project.