Considerations for revision and editing are temporarily set aside as writers enthusiastically wrangle with politics, social issues, theoretical abstractions, others' experiences, and so on. Students pose and answer questions and bring personal experiences to bear on academic issues. InterChange provides a different and perhaps more immediate means for student communication. Ideas must be supported by fact, as the vagueness becomes much more apparent in a purely written environment where the classroom dynamics of personality and bullying which may affect classroom oral discussions are at least downplayed. The electronic environment offers a flatter affective angle, which takes the steam out of emotional assertions and forces the idea of logical proof for all assertions.
Students thus see the potency of their ideas in a safe environment of peers.
In joining this kind of public discourse, writing students discover the potency of their words and ideas as they maintain a conversation with fellow students and authors. A hard copy of the InterChange dialogue is made for students afterwards for review and consideration, so students may see the evolution of their ideas and how competition in the marketplace of ideas can lead to stunning insights. This provides for a recursive approach to dialogue in which a class can double back and examine ideas and evaluations more deeply. There is a sense of adding to history in the printed page, and InterChange indirectly poses the question of whether readers should value a text simply because it is printed. Wrong chat room.