One major goal of this text: to center the student learning experience among a community of learners. Begin by believing that you are capable of outstanding student work and capable of producing beautiful, moving, thorough, thoughtful, and well-informed rhetoric.

Writing is process, and a product. Read and react accordingly. Expect that we will learn adapt in order to make shared goals more accessible to everyone.

Why does this matter to you? Because building and sustaining a learning community is a valuable experience which will serve you as a writer, a student, and a citizen.

Furthermore, living writers have more to offer one another than any textbook could. Writers write best among other writers. Learners learn best among other learners.

Although you will learn writing skills from this book, engaging in a learning community will allow you test and sharpen those skills.

At the same time, your future writing situations, whatever they may be, will be among complex discourse ecologies—specific groups of readers and writers with specific tastes, interests, and expectations. In this way, working within a learning community teach you to more actively evaluate your rhetorical situation.