ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a foundation for good and better writing, including sections on writing history, grammar, and orthography (spelling and punctuation). It helps students identify weaknesses in their writing, then to offer help and resources to improve in those weak areas. New communication technologies rarely eliminate those that preceded them, as Henry-Jean Martin pointed out in his The History and Power of Writing. They do often alter and in many cases replace the primary purposes of pre-existing technologies. New technologies also redistribute labor and can influence how we think. Digital spaces are non-linear, so the sequence of content is manipulable, by both creator and reader or viewer. Unlike a book, the web is scalable and navigable, a space we move through rather than a series of pages read in a particular, technology-ordained order. Digital readers can easily subvert planned sequences by accessing information in any order they wish.
