Although a good deal of writing has been done about reading, many articles, both in professional journals and in public media, bemoan a lack of reading skills. There is often a discourse around what students can’t do. In this article, we argue that adapting an assetbased, experiential framework around reading could be one of the most foundational and crucial steps in transforming our structures to respect, and therefore retain and engage, returning students.

This article promotes the use and study of blogs in the composition classroom in order to motivate students toward academic writing.