You can also use online publications as a topic for discussion by asking students how the fact that their essay was going to be "published" and publicly available for anyone in the class affects such features of their writing as: the topic they chose to write about, the manner in which they wrote about their topic, the language they used, what they used as evidence or detail, and how much personal experience or opinion they put into the essay. In this way, we can help students see that this context may have limited their options for writing, for example in the types of language they used (i.e. maybe they swear in their journal or in letters to friends, but chose not to within the academic and public context of this class). The goal here is to offer a concrete example of how context influences our decisions and options as writers, while also emphasizing that writers have choices within any given context (they could have chosen to swear on the forum).