Somebody forgets to bring a letter, disrupting the process. Students e-mail each other with a copy to the teacher and others. More important, the text is meaningful. In a letter to a classmate, even though the teacher receives a copy, the primary audience is another student. My students often are more conscientious when they write for each other than when they write for me alone.
Students can e-mail experts in the fields they are researching.
Their e-letters to a historian or geologist on campus will require a different discourse than their letters to a class writing partner. With e-mail dialogues, classmates, too, can be cited as scholars to quote or paraphrase in subsequent formal writing. Exchanging letters with classmates, with teachers, and with others, students learn through informal but meaningful dialogue. Some suggestions for designing assignments and structuring collaborations for e-mail and computer conferencing, modeled on dialogic processes in the works of Fulwiler, Young, and Elbow and Belanoff are online at Tips and Discussion Patterns for Interactive Online Learning . Presentation at Conference on College Composition and Communication, Milwaukee, March 1996.