Chat Room Uses
- Generate ideas for writing at the beginning of a unit.
- Start a discussion centered on the main ideas from an assigned reading.
- Print out a thread of conversation and use it to discuss the rhetorical situation - context, audience, and purpose. Ask students to analyze the choices they made when writing in a chat room (with content and style). Then, have them compare these choices to ones they make with more formal writing. Use this discussion to help students understand how various cultural contexts shape writing.
- Compare how audience awareness shapes writing. For example, conduct a chat in which you participate; then conduct one in which you don't participate. Print out both conversations and compare the kinds of comments students offered and the writing styles used. Ask students to consider how their audience affected the choices they made.